Peter Nicholas | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/2019-09-11T10:44:34-04:00Copyright 2019 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597778<p>Those who work for President Donald Trump understand the basic bargain. They stay in the job only so long as Trump wants them around, and when he doesn’t, they’re liable to be booted in humiliating fashion. Which is to say, by tweet.</p><p dir="ltr">Often Trump shows the ousted aide some initial flicker of respect. When Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned in December, Trump tweeted that he had served “with distinction.” Pushing out Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in 2017, Trump tweeted that the two had “accomplished a lot together.”</p><p dir="ltr">For John Bolton, Trump mostly dripped disdain in a pair of tweets yesterday that illustrated that the quickest path toward irrelevance in the Trump White House is telling the boss no. “I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House,” Trump wrote. “I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration …”</p><p dir="ltr">With Bolton gone, Trump loses a rare dissenting voice within his inner circle. Ascendant is Bolton’s chief bureaucratic rival, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who mastered a practice that’s necessary for long-term survival in the Trump White House: saying <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/how-key-aides-have-survived-trump-white-house/587038/?utm_source=feed">yes</a> to the president.</p><p dir="ltr">Pompeo is now unchallenged when it comes to shaping foreign policy. Trump doesn’t have the same rapport with either his defense secretary, Mark Esper, who was confirmed by the Senate just two months ago, or his CIA director, Gina Haspel, who replaced Pompeo in the job. One by one, Trump has shed aides determined to push back when he follows his gut instincts.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/john-bolton-trump-national-security-adviser/583246/?utm_source=feed">Graeme Wood: Will John Bolton bring on armageddon—or stave it off?</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">“The lesson is the Pompeo model is the only one that you need if you want to survive,” Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. “That model is to be sycophantic toward Trump and never publicly or even internally disagree. Pompeo will gently make his point that he has a different view, but if Trump indicates he’s going in a different direction, he’ll get on board. Bolton did not.”</p><p dir="ltr">Bolton is an old-fashioned hawk when it comes to the Iranian nuclear threat. Defanging the Middle East adversary comes down to steady pressure and, ultimately, regime change, Bolton believes. For all his bellicose rhetoric, Trump remains wary of military action. He worried that Bolton would draw him into unnecessary wars, while Bolton seemed dubious about Trump’s quixotic push to reach a diplomatic breakthrough with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The marriage had long ago unraveled; the only question was when Trump would tweet the divorce.</p><p dir="ltr">Bolton’s unceremonious exit came with another first: The victim fought back. Rather than stick to tradition when dumped and keep quiet, Bolton tweeted that Trump’s version of events was wrong and that he had in fact “offered to resign” last night, but that Trump had told him: “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”</p><p dir="ltr">Inside the White House, aides seemed confused about whether Bolton was staying or going. About an hour before Trump’s announcement, the White House sent out a notice saying that Bolton would appear with Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at a rare press briefing at the White House. Mnuchin and Pompeo showed up; Bolton, newly fired, did not. Is the president’s national-security team “a mess?,” a reporter asked the pair. “Absolutely not,” Mnuchin said. “That’s the most ridiculous question I’ve ever heard of.”</p><p dir="ltr">Both were quick to showcase Bolton’s isolation. “There were definitely places Ambassador Bolton and I had different views about where we should proceed,” Pompeo said. Mnuchin noted that the president and Bolton differed on the Iraq War.</p><p dir="ltr">Bolton’s ouster was hardly a surprise. Indeed, the most bewildering aspect of his tenure may have been why it lasted as long as it did. Trump tapped him for the job in March 2018 as a replacement for H. R. McMaster, who had developed little personal chemistry with Trump. The president would grow impatient with McMaster’s briefings laying out detailed national-security options, former White House aides have told me. Meanwhile, Trump had seen Bolton’s regular appearances on Fox News and relished the way he validated the administration’s policies. Always on the prowl for appointees who look like they’re from what he calls “Central Casting,” Trump was at first put off by Bolton’s push-broom <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/john-bolton-mustache-cost-him-trump-cabinet-post-fire-and-fury-claims-2018-1">mustache</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">But he warmed to Bolton and ultimately <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-names-john-bolton-as-new-national-security-adviser-1521758149">offered him the job</a> in an abrupt sequence of events that even Bolton found head-spinning. Discussing his hiring on Fox News, Bolton said at the time: “I really didn’t expect the announcement this afternoon. I think I am still a Fox News contributor.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/john-boltons-long-game/593134/?utm_source=feed">Graeme Wood: How long can John Bolton take this?</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The relationship would sour soon enough. Trump has been eager for a marquee foreign-policy achievement that would shore up his legacy. But he and Bolton clashed on how to go about it. Bolton has taken a hard-line position toward North Korea, writing in a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> op-ed before coming to the White House that a preemptive strike by the United States would be <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-north-korea-first-1519862374">“perfectly legitimate.”</a></p><p dir="ltr">Trump favors a different route. Confident in his own dealmaking skills, he has sought to woo Kim Jong Un through personal diplomacy, meeting him three times in what so far has been a futile bid to roll back North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program. When Trump met Kim at the demilitarized zone and crossed over into North Korea in June, Bolton was out of sight. Way out of sight. The national security adviser was in Mongolia on a prescheduled visit when Trump made history by becoming the first sitting president to set foot inside North Korea. Trump’s strategy, though, is arguably taking the U.S. backwards. While Trump downplays North Korean missile tests (“He likes testing missiles,” Trump said of Kim last month ), Kim has made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/asia/north-korea-kim-trump-missiles.html">technological advances</a> that have made his weapons more threatening.</p><p dir="ltr">A similar dynamic has played out in Iran. At first, it seemed like Trump and Bolton were aligned. Bolton cheered the administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. However, after months of deploying a “maximum pressure campaign” of tightening sanctions on the Islamic Republic, Trump says he is open to talking to Iranian leaders and has specifically said he is not looking to install a new regime. In his remarks to reporters today, Pompeo said that “the president has made very clear he’s prepared to meet [with Iranian leaders] with no preconditions,” a position that Bolton wouldn’t have favored. After Iran downed an unmanned U.S. drone in June, Trump considered a retaliatory military strike, a reprisal heavily favored by Bolton, but Trump scuttled the mission shortly before it was to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/middleeast/iran-us-drone.html?module=inline">begin</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">The abrupt announcement by Trump that he was canceling a meeting he had secretly planned with Taliban leaders at Camp David may have strained relations beyond repair. Trump, in preparing to hold such a meeting, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/secret-taliban-peace-talks-camp-david-floated-scrapped-within-week-n1051286">reportedly</a> did so against the advice of Bolton and other senior advisers.</p><p dir="ltr">Bolton’s “priorities and policies just don’t line up with the president,” a White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, told reporters. The deeper he gets into his presidency, the more Trump seems unmoored from staff. Gone are the three-and four-star generals who once dominated Trump’s West Wing and Cabinet. Pompeo makes clear that it’s the staff’s job to execute Trump’s wishes, not second-guess them.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/trumps-national-security-adviser-impossible-job/597772/?utm_source=feed">Read: The White House’s impossible job</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">“I watched his campaign,” Pompeo said at the press briefing. “I’ve now worked with him first as CIA director and now as secretary of state. Someone asked, ‘Would the policy be different absent any individual being here?’ These have been the president’s policies.”</p><p dir="ltr">Public firings have become a ritual inside a White House that has seen record-setting <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-trump-administration/">turnover</a>. Trump plans to appoint a new national security adviser next week. Whoever he picks will become the fourth national security adviser since he took office in January 2017. No other president has seen so much churn in the national-security-adviser position since it was created in the early 1950s, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Names that have been floating as potential successors to Bolton include Stephen Biegun, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea; and Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and a favorite of the Trump family. Whoever it is will need to give an emboldened president considerable deference—or face another firing by tweet.</p><p dir="ltr">Wright told me: “The long-term trajectory on the Trump presidency’s foreign policy is very clear. He’s trying to get rid of any constraints or checks on power in his decision making. Right now what he wants to do is work with the Taliban, Iran, and North Korea. These are all things that Bolton is steadfastly opposed to, and Trump doesn’t want obstacles thrown in his way.”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / ReutersThe Quickest Path to Irrelevance in the Trump White House2019-09-11T05:00:00-04:002019-09-11T10:44:34-04:00John Bolton’s days were numbered from the start.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597622<p dir="ltr">If you’re a Fox News staffer who happened to be off Twitter one Wednesday morning last month, it may well have escaped your notice that the president of the United States was excoriating your employer.</p><p dir="ltr">At about 10 a.m. ET on August 28, Donald Trump<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1166711516701347842?s=20"> lashed out</a> at his go-to cable network for “heavily promoting Democrats,” his response to a segment that featured the Democratic National Committee’s communications director. He <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1166712943196680193?s=20">took to Twitter again</a> a few minutes later, accusing Fox of “letting millions of GREAT people down!”</p><p dir="ltr">“We have to start looking for a new news outlet,” he wrote. “Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”</p><p dir="ltr">Those tweets prompted discussion for days in newspapers and on other television networks, with reporters and analysts probing the president’s building frustrations with Fox and his use of “us” and “we” when criticizing its coverage—providing easy fodder for those who charge the network with being a propaganda arm of the Trump administration. Yet within the walls of Fox News’ headquarters, the reaction to Trump’s outbursts was something like a collective shrug, according to multiple Fox employees and others with professional ties to the network. “You’d think there’d be some drama, but there’s been no channel-wide initiative or anything to address the attacks,” said one staffer, who like others we talked with for this story requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. “There’s honestly been no acknowledgment of them.”</p><p dir="ltr">That reaction, or lack thereof, underscores a growing understanding among Fox News executives, the staffers and those with ties to the network said: When it comes to their relationship with the president, the executives have the leverage. It is perhaps a singular dynamic—a private entity comfortable in the knowledge that the leader of the free world needs its favor more than it needs his. Much of this stems from the network’s peerlessness in the world of right-wing programming. Fox speaks directly to Trump’s base, a core constituency that the president must keep intact if he is to win reelection. And while other outlets may be somewhat more reliably pro-Trump, such as the cable channels One America News Network and Newsmax, none comes close to matching Fox’s massive reach.</p><p dir="ltr">But the current dynamic also seems to reflect the leadership of Roger Ailes’s successor as Fox News CEO, Suzanne Scott, who has worked for the network since its founding and took over in 2018. Whereas Ailes, who was tapped by Rupert Murdoch to be Fox’s first chief executive, operated as a network-wide choreographer, with his stamp on seemingly every segment, Scott’s approach has been much more decentralized. Each show acts as an “island” of sorts, as the Fox News staffer put it. The result is a daily show lineup in which the divide between the news and opinion wings is clearer than ever—a division that Scott may be more inclined to foster rather than eradicate on orders from the president. (A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment or make Scott available for this story.)</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/bret-baier/542010/?utm_source=feed">Read: A conversation with Bret Baier, the news guy at Fox News</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">“I don’t get the sense from talking to Suzanne that she’s at all concerned about it. She just seemed to shrug,” one person who has spoken recently with Scott told us, referring to Trump’s attacks. “They’re not scared of One America News. They know there’s nowhere else for their audience to go.”</p><p dir="ltr">August 28 was not the first time Trump made known his frustrations with Fox’s coverage. He has, among other criticisms, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/18/trump-fox-news-polls-not-happy-1467182">attacked the network’s widely respected polling division</a> for producing surveys that show him trailing top Democratic 2020 challengers in head-to-head matchups; <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/457885-trump-calls-juan-williams-pathetic-nasty-and-wrong">called the political analyst Juan Williams “pathetic,” “nasty,” and “wrong”</a> for criticizing his trade policies with China; and lobbed insults at anchors and hosts including <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-attacks-fox-news-chris-wallace-over-positive-democrat-coverage-1429938">Chris Wallace</a> and <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/media/456609-trump-lashes-out-fox-news-shep-smith-says-fake-news-cnn-is-better">Shepard Smith</a> for discussing news unfavorable to him.</p><p dir="ltr">According to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, the president’s dissatisfaction with Fox relates to a criticism he has with his own Republican Party. “It’s like Republicans in the House and Senate—the Democrats are always sticking together, and we always have a couple of people breaking away,” Giuliani told us. Trump and his allies don’t understand why when, say, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York “does something crazy, [Democrats] all defend her,” Giuliani said. But when Republicans “have that guy from Iowa”—referring to Representative Steve King, who is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/why-does-steve-king-keep-winning/575200/?utm_source=feed">notorious for his racist comments</a>—“we condemn him.”</p><p dir="ltr">“I think a lot of Republicans feel that [Democrats are] more loyal than we are,” Giuliani said. “When they hear Shepard Smith or [the anchor Neil] Cavuto, they say, ‘Well, why are <em>they</em> monolithic one way and we’re not?’”</p><p dir="ltr">The comparison between congressional Republicans who buck Trump and news anchors who report information that may reflect negatively on him is, of course, a false one. That Trump sees the two groups as similar is crucial to understanding his hot-and-cold treatment of Fox.</p><p dir="ltr">On occasions when he’s unhappy with the network’s coverage, Trump will pick up the phone and call Scott to complain, a Trump-administration aide and a second Fox News employee told us. But the conversations, the Fox staffer said, don’t tend to go well.</p><p dir="ltr">“I’m not sure she tells him what he wants to hear,” this person said. “If you think about Suzanne, it’s like, <em>I’m running the network. The president is not running the network.</em> And if you’re Donald Trump, it’s like, <em>Damn if you are—I’m running the network</em>. And, to be candid, there have been times when the network probably gave Trump too much of the idea that he was running the network.”</p><p dir="ltr">Fox continues to showcase a pro-Trump lineup in its primetime hours: Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham, who often expand on the president’s talking points during their shows. But under Scott, the network has ushered in a slightly more diverse set of voices. Donna Brazile, the former DNC chairwoman, is now a Fox News contributor. In 2017, the year before Scott took over as CEO, she and another senior executive, Jay Wallace, recruited Marie Harf, a former State Department spokeswoman during Barack Obama’s administration, for a job as a political commentator. In giving Harf an on-air role, the Fox executives told her that they wanted different views reflected in their broadcasts, a person familiar with the matter told us. (Harf left the network to join Representative Seth Moulton’s now-defunct presidential campaign.)</p><p>The person who’s spoken with Scott recently told us that if the CEO is sensitive about anything, it’s the criticisms of the network as propaganda—not Trump’s complaints. <a id="correction one" name="correction%20one"></a>Scott started at Fox at the network’s inception in 1996, working as an executive assistant to the head of programming; led the launch of Greta Van Susteren’s primetime show <em>On the Record</em> in 2002; and went on to become network executive producer and executive vice president of programming.<a href="#correction%20one%20anchor">*</a> Before becoming the network’s first female CEO, she oversaw some of Fox’s most popular opinion shows, including <em>Fox &amp; Friends</em>, <em>The Five</em>, and <em>Hannity</em>. But what limited public profile she had was largely negative: After Ailes <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/8/15/12416662/roger-ailes-fox-sexual-harassment-women-list">was publicly accused</a> of sexual harassment and abuse at the company in 2016, <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ailes-victim-laura-luhn-sues-fox-news-ceo-suzanne-scott-for-alleged-defamation-and-cover-up-of-sexual-abuse-at-network-and-asks-for-120-million-in-damages-300837037.html">she was alleged </a>to have helped cover up the misbehavior. She and Fox have since moved to dismiss the suit, and she has claimed that she had <a href="https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/suzanne-scott-i-had-no-clue-on-what-was-going-on-in-roger-ailes-office-i-have-never-had-any-issues-with-any-sort-of-harassment-myself/398696/">“no clue on what was going on”</a> in Ailes’s office.</p><p dir="ltr">As CEO, Scott was tasked with navigating the fallout at the network from the #MeToo movement, which swept up some of Fox’s most public-facing figures. Now she finds herself confronting periodic calls for advertiser boycotts because of commentators’ frequently inflammatory rhetoric. “She’s more concerned about monitoring outside critiques than Ailes was,” the person who has spoken with Scott said. Recent decisions, such as hiring Brazile and hosting town halls with Democratic presidential candidates, are in part Scott’s response “to the trauma from the #MeToo stuff,” this person continued. “She’s just trying to do stuff to make it a modern workplace.”</p><p dir="ltr">Still, these changes don’t mean that Fox is undertaking a wholesale reinvention or scrubbing the basic formula that first magnetized its conservative Republican viewers. This obvious truth prompts some within Fox to wave off Trump’s criticisms as disingenuous, if not whiny. “Mr. President, we’re giving you a fair shake! Fucking take it!” the second Fox employee told us. “Suzanne is … bringing in new voices and diversifying Fox, and if you’re Donald Trump, you no-likey. He’s like, <em>What am I seeing here? This looks more like CNN</em>. It’s not! It’s nowhere close to CNN!”</p><p dir="ltr">Indeed, while the network employs some well-respected reporters, its identity is rooted in the commentary coming from its star opinionators. Carl Cameron, a former chief political correspondent at Fox who left the network in 2017 after more than 20 years, told us: “The opinion makers, the entertainment side of Fox News is absolutely promoting [Trump]. They are defending him, they are buying into his nonsense, and when it’s just too ridiculous to even untangle and make sense of it, they simply ignore it.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/11/sean-hannity-donald-trumps-true-press-secretary/575023/?utm_source=feed">Read: Sean Hannity is Trump’s shadow press secretary</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">For Trump, Scott’s ascension may have been unwelcome. Trump thought enough of Bill Shine, a former senior network executive, that the president hired him to run the White House communications shop in 2018. (Shine has been accused in civil lawsuits of helping to cover up for Ailes. He has denied <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house">those allegations</a>, and has not been accused of sexual harassment himself. He resigned from the White House in March, after about eight months on the job.) After Ailes left the network, he helped Trump prepare for the 2016 presidential debates with Hillary Clinton. (Ailes died the next year.)</p><p dir="ltr">Those allies long gone, Trump’s now got Scott, whose politics are a mystery even to some of the people working for her. “In private,” however, “she has said she’s horrified by some of the things that he says and does,” the second Fox News employee told us.</p><p>At this point, the president is likely the one with more to lose. As Trumpworld sees it, Fox is an essential corrective to a cable-news ecosystem that masquerades as objective while plotting to sink his presidency. He needs Fox to counter the media criticism coming his way, and if the network wobbles, it’s trouble. Trump barely won in 2016, and any defections inside his base could potentially doom his prospects.</p><p dir="ltr">“The other networks push an openly anti-Trump agenda on every show, every minute, every hour of every day,” one administration official told us, when we asked for comment on Trump’s recent attacks. “He expects Fox to ask tough questions of Democrats when they come on the network, because they don’t get asked tough questions anywhere else.”</p><p dir="ltr">That’s a debatable point, of course. Cable-news anchors—not to mention late-night comedians—pay plenty of attention to the former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s gaffes. In 2016, they gave ample coverage to Clinton’s email scandal. What’s more, Trump digs holes for himself virtually every day. No liberal host at MSNBC told Trump to peddle the fiction that Hurricane Dorian was a threat to Alabama, for example.</p><p dir="ltr">Ferreting out Trump’s true motivations is never easy. Does he act on impulse, or is there some coherent strategy at work? One former White House aide offered a theory: What if he isn’t as mad at Fox as he lets on? What if he’s giving Fox political cover of sorts—insulating the network from the charge that it’s doing Trump’s bidding?</p><p dir="ltr">“He’s smart and strategic, and it’s always possible he’s preempting the state-TV, propaganda criticism of Fox by putting some distance between the two of them,” this person told us. “It’s always possible.”</p><p dir="ltr">If the president is upset by Fox’s programming, there is one solution—an alternative he seems hell-bent never to try.</p><p>“The best thing he could do is turn off the TV,” says Bill Press, a liberal TV-talk-show veteran and the host of <em>The Bill Press Pod</em>. “And I say that as someone who made a living on television! It’s not good for you. It’s not healthy. Nobody should be watching as much television as Donald Trump watches.”</p><hr><p><small style=""><span><u><a href="#correction%20one">*</a><a id="correction one anchor" name="correction%20one%20anchor"></a></u></span><i>A previous version of this story misidentified Suzanne Scott's first job at Fox News. </i></small></p>Elaina Plotthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedPeter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedChip Somodevilla / GettyFox News Has the Power Over Trump2019-09-09T10:00:30-04:002019-09-09T16:37:47-04:00The president’s recent attacks on the network barely registered inside its headquarters.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597343<p dir="ltr">Outside the cloistered world that serious chess players inhabit, few would have taken any special note of the death last month of Pal Benko, at age 91. Benko was a top grand master and one of the game’s great artists. After defecting from his native Hungary in 1957, he moved to the United States, competing in tournaments and composing ingenious puzzles that introduced generations of young players to the mysteries of the endgame.</p><p dir="ltr">But his singular contribution to American chess wasn’t at the board. Without Benko, there might not have been Bobby Fischer—at least not the Fischer who delivered the U.S. perhaps its greatest cultural victory of the Cold War. His competitive career fading, Benko stepped aside in 1970 and let the younger, more talented Fischer take his place in the competition to determine a challenger for the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. Fischer, who had been playing sporadically throughout the 1960s and who seemed on the brink of quitting the game altogether, tore through the qualifying tournaments before dethroning Spassky in a 1972 match that riveted America.</p><p dir="ltr">Benko and Fischer hadn’t always been on the best of terms. Playing in a tournament in 1962 in the Caribbean, they squabbled one night and got into a fistfight—“the first fistfight ever recorded by two grandmasters,” Frank Brady wrote in his Fischer biography, <em>Endgame</em>. But they reconciled and stayed friends to the end. “Pal felt that Bobby could change the chess world—which Bobby did—and if Bobby became world champion, that would benefit the whole game,” Susan Polgar, a friend of both men and a former women’s world chess champion, told me. “His own personal interest was secondary to the bigger picture.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/pawn-sacrifice-bobby-fischer-biopic/406048/?utm_source=feed">Read: ‘Pawn Sacrifice’ and the quest to understand Bobby Fischer</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Another chess master who was central to the Fischer story also died last month: Shelby Lyman. Though not a world-class player, Lyman did more to popularize chess in America than anyone not named Bobby Fischer. He was teaching chess in New York when one of his students, a TV executive, tapped him to host a PBS show covering the Fischer-Spassky match. Lyman proved a natural showman, explaining densely complicated chess positions to TV viewers, many of whom thought of a fork only as an eating utensil. (In chess, it’s a move where a single piece makes at least two simultaneous attacks.) Like tons of other kids at the time, I’d turn to Channel 13 in New York that summer and follow Lyman’s commentary move by move, sparking a lifelong interest in the game. After becoming a journalist, I <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-10-02-0210020007-story.html">wrote about</a> Lyman, and from time to time we’d talk about the match.</p><p dir="ltr">“I had no concept of TV,” he told me. “I never watched television. I had no idea how a talk show host should act.” But, he added, “chess is a dramatic event. You could hear the swords clang on the shields with every move. They went at each other. The average person is turned onto chess when it’s presented right. Trying to figure out the next move is a fascinating adventure—an adventure people can get into.”</p><p dir="ltr">With his bushy brown hair and endearing miscues (in that low-tech era, he’d fumble for the pieces he used to shove onto demonstration boards), Lyman became a mini-celebrity, while interest in the ancient game boomed. In the year before the match, membership in the U.S. Chess Federation was about 27,000. A year after Fischer won the title, it had <a href="http://www.uschess.org/datapage/USCF0100.htm">more than doubled</a>, to about 59,000. “Shelby was the face of chess in America,” Bruce Pandolfini, the coach and author who was played by the actor Ben Kingsley in the movie <em>Searching for Bobby Fischer</em>, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">The loss of Benko and Lyman draws the curtain on an era in American chess that produced some of the game’s richest personalities and most sparkling play. The players and teachers who dominated the firmament in the mid-20th century were the game’s greatest generation. They bested a Soviet pipeline of grand masters who once had a stranglehold on the title.</p><p dir="ltr">One by one, they’re dying out. Fischer is gone, having died in Iceland in 2008, at age 64. Bill Lombardy, who served as Fischer’s second during the 1972 match and was a world-class grand master in his own right, died two years ago, at 79. Larry Evans, who helped Fischer write the influential chess book <em>My 60 Memorable Games</em>, passed away in 2010, at age 78. Robert Byrne, who in 1963 lost to Fischer in one of the most artful chess games ever played and later wrote a chess column for <em>The New York Times</em>, died six years ago, at 84.</p><p dir="ltr">There may never be another generation like it, or a set of geopolitical circumstances that would make a chess match quite so absorbing. “He was a supernova,” Hikaru Nakamura, a 31-year-old American who has ranked among the world’s top five players, told me of Fischer. “It’s something that will never happen again.” No other American has won the world title since Fischer forfeited his in 1975. No chess personality has broken through to a mass audience like Lyman. No nation seems to stoke America’s competitive fires quite like the old Soviet Union. “What the women’s national soccer team has done in the last few years is what these chess players did during the Cold War in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s,” Joseph Ponterotto, a counseling-psychology professor at Fordham University Graduate School of Education and the author of <em>A Psychobiography of Bobby Fischer</em>, told me. “There was new blood. We were standing on the world stage, and Russia was not going to dominate. Benko was part of that team that led to Bobby Fischer taking down the Russian chess empire.”</p><p dir="ltr">Thrilling though the dramatis personae may have been, the protagonist came to a sad end. After winning the title, Fischer became a recluse, descending deeper into paranoid, anti-Semitic behavior that had long been evident but became more pronounced as he aged. (Fischer himself was Jewish, born out of wedlock to Regina Fischer—a nurse, doctor, and left-wing activist—and a Hungarian physicist named Paul Nemenyi. The family had kept his parentage a secret for decades. Through FBI files, court records, and interviews, my wife, Clea Benson, and I <a href="https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-bobby-fischer21-2009sep21-story.html">pieced together</a> that Fischer’s biological father was Nemenyi, not the German biophysicist Gerhardt Fischer, as was widely assumed.)</p><p dir="ltr">Fischer was indicted by the U.S. in 1992 for playing an exhibition match with Spassky in Yugoslavia, in violation of economic sanctions. Eluding authorities, he shuttled between Hungary, Japan, and other countries until he was ultimately granted citizenship—and refuge—in Iceland in 2005. He chased away friends and alienated admirers. Pandolfini told me of a phone call he got from Fischer in the mid-1980s after the coach had published a book called <em>Bobby Fischer’s Outrageous Chess Moves</em>. The book celebrated Fischer’s incandescent play, but the subject didn’t see it that way. Fischer thought the word <em>outrageous </em>was an insult. “He was incensed with me,” Pandolfini told me. “He said, ‘Outrageous, isn’t that a critical word?’” Pandolfini assured him it was a high compliment.</p><p dir="ltr">Polgar told me she would dine with Fischer and Benko in Budapest in the 1990s. At one restaurant, Fischer pulled out his pocket chess set to discuss games, when he noticed that the paparazzi had shown up and were taking his picture. <em>Let’s go</em>, he told the group. They fled the restaurant and piled into Polgar’s Volkswagen Passat.<em> Drive fast!</em> Fischer exhorted her, covering the car windows with his large hands to thwart the photographers.</p><p dir="ltr">A dilemma in chess circles is how to reconcile Fischer’s magnificent play with his abhorrent beliefs. It comes down to this: Can you relish the moves even if you despise the man? Was the 13-year-old Fischer’s brilliant queen sacrifice in what was dubbed the “Game of the Century” diminished by his later screeds about Jews? Polgar, who is Jewish, recalls how she dealt with his odious obsessions. “I told him I disagreed with his views and he should reconsider,” she told me. “At some point, we stopped talking about that topic. He knew I wasn’t going to change my mind. I wasn’t going to change his mind. So we agreed to talk about chess.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/06/which-bobby-fischer-should-we-remember/239913/?utm_source=feed">Read: Which Bobby Fischer should we remember?</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Lyman and I had discussed Fischer’s mental state, too, before Fischer’s death. I’d asked him what he thought about Fischer’s rants. “Maybe he’s a monster; I don’t think he is,” Lyman said at the time. “It’s possible he’s become a raving lunatic; I doubt it. I think he’s a person with a circumscribed problem that’s getting bigger. The main point is, this is detracting from his greatness. When he was at the board playing, it was like God playing. The purity of his thought, the search for truth, the ability to calculate and go to the core of a problem: Bobby never looked for an easy move that would blow away his opponent. He looked for the truth in chess.”</p><p dir="ltr">Lyman’s focus on Fischer’s play, rather than his neuroses, isn’t all that uncommon. To this day, Fischer remains the benchmark by which other grand masters are judged. When prodigies play a brilliant game, they’re compared to Fischer. Perhaps ironically, the current crop of grand masters has in many ways surpassed the achievements seen in the Fischer era. Two top U.S. players, Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, both eclipsed Fischer’s peak rating—a measure of how players perform against the opposition. Caruana challenged the reigning champion, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, in a title match last year but was narrowly defeated. Since Fischer’s day, the center of gravity has migrated from New York to St. Louis, where a wealthy retired financier, Rex Sinquefield, founded a <a href="https://saintlouischessclub.org/">chess club</a> that showcases the world’s best players. Each year, the club hosts an <a href="https://saintlouischessclub.org/civicrm/event/info%3Fid%3D8754%26reset%3D1">elite tournament</a> for top grand masters. In the event that ended last month, as many as 25,000 people watched the games live on the club’s YouTube channel, the club’s executive director, Tony Rich, told me—an audience topping the live attendance at many Major League Baseball games.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet, there are unmistakable signs that, at the highest levels, chess’s freshness and creativity seem to be withering. Computers have changed the game forever. Players enlist powerful programs as they search for opening novelties and new strategies. Computers have taught them resources that make it possible to salvage what were once thought to be losing positions. Many top games end in bloodless draws. A draw, an opponent once told me after our game ended with no winner or loser, is about as exciting as “kissing your sister.”</p><p dir="ltr">“No matter how badly you play, unless you make a flat-out blunder, there’s always going to be some narrow path to being able to save the game and draw instead of losing,” Nakamura told me. One consequence of this shift has been a certain parity at the top ranks. The Carlsen-Caruana world-championship match featured 12-straight draws before Carlsen finally prevailed in a tie-break. Compare that to Fischer’s day, when he reeled off 20 straight wins during his march to the world title. Players today may go 15, 20 moves or more into the game before they’re thinking on their own, relying instead on computer-driven preparation. “Everyone is using the same programs, everyone is looking at the same opening ideas,” Nakamura said. “I wouldn’t say everyone is necessarily the same in terms of talent or ability, but when you’re able to prepare games that go so deep that you don’t have to think, really, it balances out the field.</p><p dir="ltr">“Definitely, some of the artistry and poetry has been lost in modern chess. It’s very rare that I play a game where I’m like, <em>Wow, this is really interesting. There were so many possibilities! It was such a rich game.</em> When I was younger, I would look at a game with computers and still be fascinated by the possibilities. Now it almost never happens.”</p><p dir="ltr">Rich, of the St. Louis Chess Club, told me: “I’m torn on this.” He noted that in the tournament that ended last month, there was indeed a higher percentage of drawn games than usual. Even so, he said, that doesn’t necessarily make the contests any less exciting. “Positions where players maybe would have lost in past years—through the help of computers, and the players’ seconds, and training regimens—they’ve been able to find ways to defend these kinds of things. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the game was boring. Quite the opposite. Some of the most exciting games have ended in draws, either because of a miracle escape or because the fireworks and tactics maybe fizzled out into a draw.”</p><p dir="ltr">When I spoke with Nakamura, he had just finished competing in the St. Louis tournament, called the Sinquefield Cup. He told me that he had heard about Benko’s death on the morning of one of the final rounds and wanted to pay tribute. Benko is the author of an eponymous opening line for the black pieces. The idea is to surrender a pawn in exchange for active play on the queen side of the board. Nakamura hadn’t prepared, but in honor of the fallen grand master, he decided he would take a risk and play the Benko Gambit anyway. <em>The hell with it</em>, he thought to himself. <em>Why not? I’m just going to have some fun.</em></p><p dir="ltr">He didn’t get a chance. His opponent, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave of France, would have needed to open the game by pushing his queen pawn forward two squares. But that’s not Vachier-Lagrave’s preference. With the white pieces, the French player opened by pushing his king pawn two squares—and so Nakamura didn’t get to play the opening that Benko had pioneered. “It takes two to tango,” Polgar told me, when I described to her what had happened. The game ended in a draw.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedAssociated PressPaul Keres of the Soviet Union (<i>left</i>) is seen in play against Bobby Fischer of the U.S. in Bled, Slovenia, in 1959. Pal Benko of the U.S., arms folded, looks on.The End of the Golden Era of Chess2019-09-05T06:00:00-04:002019-09-05T15:40:41-04:00The recent passing of Pal Benko and Shelby Lyman draws the curtain on an American period that produced some of the game’s most sparkling play.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597028<p class="dropcap">When I <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/anthony-scaramucci-talks-trump-mueller-and-2020/588982/?utm_source=feed">last visited Anthony Scaramucci</a>, in the middle of his investment company’s annual conference in Las Vegas, he made it known that if President Donald Trump wanted him, he’d be game for a sequel.</p><p>That was back in May. Much has happened since in the life of the erstwhile White House adviser, who in the summer of 2017 spent 11 memorable days as Trump’s communications director before he was fired over <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/anthony-scaramucci-called-me-to-unload-about-white-house-leakers-reince-priebus-and-steve-bannon">a profane phone interview</a>.</p><p>Scaramucci is poised for a second act, just not the one he envisioned. He’s been feuding with Trump ever since he appeared on the August 9 episode of <em>Real Time With Bill Maher</em>, where he told the audience that some of what the president has done has been “absolutely indefensible.” Trump tweeted that he was watching the broadcast, albeit “by accident.” (That’s by no means uncommon: Maybe the remote gets stuck on the wrong channel. Maybe you press the buttons, but nothing happens, and before you know it, you’ve spent an hour of your presidency watching premium cable<em>. An accident.</em>)</p><p>As he is wont to do, the president flayed his former aide on Twitter. And Scaramucci didn’t appreciate it. The man who just last year wrote a book declaring that Trump “has an intellect uniquely suited to the presidency,” and who had long celebrated the president’s feel for working-class America, was now a Never Trumper—one who’s pledging to create a political-action committee and mobilize like-minded allies to push Trump out of office.</p><p>Since his <em>Real Time</em> appearance, plenty of doubters have questioned whether Scaramucci is sincere and a reliable soldier for the so-called Resistance. He raised and donated millions of dollars toward Trump’s 2016 election victory and coveted a top White House job even as some of his fellow Republicans abandoned the president, citing his boasts about sexually assaulting women, his belittling of John McCain’s military service, and his mocking of a disabled reporter. In a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/15/anthony-scaramucci-is-how-you-got-trump/"><em>Washington Post</em></a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/15/anthony-scaramucci-is-how-you-got-trump/"> op-ed</a> published earlier this month, the Republican strategist Rick Wilson wrote: “Yes, he’s had it with Trump, but there’s something that grinds about the road-to-Damascus conversion narrative of the president’s former confidant and fellow New York blowhard. There’s a whiff of a reality-TV tease, the aroma of a pro-wrestling kayfabe, the faint stench of a canned <em>I’m fired? No, you’re fired!</em> melodrama, mostly because none of Trump’s character flaws were hidden from Scaramucci or anyone else in the enabler class.”</p><p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/09/anthony-scaramucci-a-top-republican-fundraiser-signs-on-with-trump-campaign/">The president and Scaramucci </a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/09/anthony-scaramucci-a-top-republican-fundraiser-signs-on-with-trump-campaign/">have had their ups and downs</a> since Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015. They weren’t on bad terms when Scaramucci was booted out. His head-spinning rise and fall became a cultural sensation, etching his name into the lexicon. <em>Mooch. Noun. 1. Nonscientific term for a unit of time equal to 11 days, the length of Scaramucci’s White House employment.</em></p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/seven-against-thebes/535464/?utm_source=feed">Read: The spectacular self-destruction of Anthony Scaramucci</a>]</i></p><p>This time, though, the break seems permanent. Can you rebuild a relationship with a person you call “an insecure orange turd”—Scaramucci’s new nickname for his old boss? Can you reestablish trust with someone who says you’re a “highly unstable nut job”—the president’s characterization of Scaramucci?</p><p>Détente is unthinkable, Scaramucci told me. “It’s beyond reconciliation,” he said. “Look at the guy’s record and look at his personality. No way you can reconcile with somebody like that. He’s a presidential monster, and he’s got to be defeated.”</p><p>We spoke for about 40 minutes on the phone this week, covering his growing disaffection with Trump, his motivations for turning on his old boss, and his plans for limiting the president to just one term. “I’m having a very relaxing, uneventful summer,” he joked. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.</p><hr><p><strong>Peter Nicholas: </strong>When we spoke in Las Vegas, you seemed ready to return to the White House if the president asked. What happened?</p><p><strong>Anthony Scaramucci: </strong>His style, his mannerisms, his demagoguery, his racist tropes—this sort of stuff is way overwhelming anything he’s doing in terms of economic policy and things like that.</p><p>Going after me on his Twitter account was sort of the end for me. A sign of full-blown demagoguery, as if Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy got together and had a baby and it ended up being Donald Trump. And now he’s running the American government.</p><p>In spite of all the help I tried to give him—and I was in the White House for a short period of time and I tried to stay loyal to him—there is just an overwhelming preponderance of evidence now that he’s a very misguided, arguably sick person who you can’t really support anymore.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>In your book, <em>Trump, the Blue-Collar President</em>, you wrote, “The most important contribution Donald Trump has given the American worker is even more valuable than the extra money in their pockets. It’s the sense of pride that has been restored.” Do you still feel that’s true?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci: </strong>I do feel that’s true. A presidential historian down the line will say there was a vacuum of advocacy from Democrats and Republicans as it related to advocating for blue-collar workers. They felt disenfranchised. They felt they weren’t being heard and there were no real policy prescriptions for them. Whether you like the president or dislike the president, objectively, he’ll be remembered for that. He provided them something, and—by the way—that’s one of the main reasons why you have a very large group of people who, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/23/politics/donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support/index.html">to quote the president</a>, would stay loyal to him even if he shot people on Fifth Avenue. Because for 30 years, they’ve had a lack of advocacy.</p><p>If you want to beat the president, stop calling people “deplorable.” Stop calling them “white ethnocentrists” and “white nationalists.” Call them what they actually are: They’re people who have economic anxiety and who want to do better in society.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>What do you think of the way Trump has staffed and organized the White House? The person in your old job is Stephanie Grisham; she’s also the press secretary. What do you make of this team?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci: </strong>He’s as pure a narcissist as you can get. So what happens is when you’re a full-blown narcissist like that, you can’t take anybody’s counsel. You have such insecurity that you’re afraid if you get an idea from somebody, that it can end up in the press that that person had some measure of influence over you. So he doesn’t take anybody’s counsel. If anything, he’ll do the exact opposite of what someone is suggesting. That’s exactly what he did with the trade situation. He thought he was bigger than the 75-year-old global-trading system. He’s wreaking havoc on it.</p><p>I don’t take it personally that [Grisham] has come after me. [In a TV interview this month, following Scaramucci’s <em>Real Time</em> appearance, Grisham said his “feelings just seem to be hurt.”] I understand it’s her job. But I would point out to people that Stephanie has lasted way more “Mooches” than me. But I still have one over on her. I’ve done one more press conference than her.</p><p>That should tell you where things are in the White House. This guy has to control everything, and everyone is on pins and needles and at their sycophantic best. It’s just no way to run something.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>When you were in the White House, did you see any behavior from Trump that troubled you?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci: </strong>There was only one specific conversation that I had with him directly, and that was over Russian sanctions. He didn’t want to sign those sanctions. That was back in July [of 2017]. And I told him, “You’re going to get overturned by the Senate. They’re going to override your veto, and that’s going to be emasculating. I think you should find a different fight<em>.” </em>He ended up signing them. I’m not saying he did it because of me.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>What do you believe needs to happen now? Do you want to see the Cabinet invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment? Should Republicans defeat him in the primary?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci: </strong>They’ve looked at the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—many of the Cabinet members have. And the big reluctance there is he has such an ardent base, he has such loyal, aggressive support, that I think they’re worried there could be some kind of social upheaval as a result of this. I think where it stands right now is he has to get beaten at the ballot box. There has to be a full-blown litigation of who he is, what he’s done, the damage he’s done to our society, and then you’ve got to hope and pray that the Democrats put up somebody that’s not a full-blown socialist.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/anthony-scaramucci-talks-trump-mueller-and-2020/588982/?utm_source=feed">Read: The lingering mystery of Anthony Scaramucci</a>]</i></p><p>What I’m hoping to do over the next three or four months is hit him so hard that we knock down his poll numbers. If we can knock them into the low 30s or high 20s [from his roughly 40 percent approval rating now, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/203207/trump-job-approval-weekly.aspx">according to Gallup</a>], it becomes a fait accompli, and like Lyndon Johnson [in 1968], he doesn’t run. That will make the field wide open. That’s the goal. I may have sucked as a communications director, but I’m a pretty organized entrepreneur.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>When you went to work for him, you knew about the <em>Access Hollywood</em> tape, the insults of John McCain, the mocking of the disabled reporter, the Muslim ban, yet you were still willing to do it. Why?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci: </strong>This is the dilemma. You can accuse me of being wrong, and misguided, and equivocating on the president’s behalf, and trying to rationalize that there were good policies, and so I would take the good with the bad. But I’m remorseful and contrite and regretful about all that. Now what I’m suggesting to people is, if you want to lambaste me for it, go ahead. But I’m encouraging people who want to defeat Trump not to do that to others. We have to create an off-ramp for people who made those same very bad decisions that I made, but also had the courage to admit they were wrong, and to come out in force against this man.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>There are critics who say you’re doing this for publicity purposes. What is your response?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci:</strong> I need this sort of publicity like a hole in my head. If I just stayed in the tank for Trump—I was getting a fairly requisite share of publicity—this is not the kind of publicity that people like. This takes a tremendous amount of gumption and courage to speak up and stand for the truth in a society right now where people are having a hard time and are confused by what the truth actually is. I’m taking tremendous incoming from both sides. If this was a move to create publicity, it was a fairly dumb move.</p><p><strong>Nicholas: </strong>What do you make of former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s new gig on <em>Dancing With the Stars</em>?</p><p><strong>Scaramucci: </strong>It’s a free market. If the production people thought it was a good idea to cast him, and beneficial to the show, and it’s going to help him out, then God bless them. I don’t begrudge anyone making money in our country. I thought it was a lot of fun to go on <em>Celebrity Big Brother</em> when they asked me to. I couldn’t stay for the whole season, but I did a short stint, which was a lot of fun.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedRay Tamarra / GettyAnthony Scaramucci Wants You to Believe Him This Time2019-08-29T05:00:00-04:002019-08-29T07:58:28-04:00The newest member of the anti-Trump crowd is promising to mobilize against the president: “I may have sucked as a communications director, but I’m a pretty organized entrepreneur.”tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-596875<p dir="ltr">The most striking photograph to emerge from the G7 summit meeting in Biarritz, France, is one of an empty chair.</p><p>It’s the seat that President Donald Trump was supposed to occupy during a meeting today where world leaders talked about climate trends that could render parts of the planet uninhabitable if left unchecked.</p><p>Trump skipped it.</p><p dir="ltr">The White House put out a statement that Trump was busy talking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and couldn’t make it—though both of those leaders found time to show up for the session. No one waited for Trump; the leaders of the world’s most economically advanced democratic nations went ahead despite his absence.</p><p dir="ltr">Which is becoming the norm.</p><p>With Trump at odds with much of the free world, the free world seems to be moving on without him. At the G7, leaders seemed to have given up on the prospect of forging a consensus with him on trade, climate, and even whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is friend or foe. The summit appeared to be organized in ways that diminished the likelihood of a Trumpian tantrum.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link">Read more: <i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/donald-trump-g7-summit/596788/?utm_source=feed">Trump’s two summits</a>]</i></p><p>Leaders ditched the tradition of ending the summit with a full-blown communiqué—a joint statement—reflecting common values and a strategy for confronting the most vexing problems. They may have been scarred by the blowup at the end of the G7 last year in Canada. Trump <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/10/g7-in-disarray-after-trump-rejects-communique-and-attacks-weak-trudeau">withdrew from </a>the communiqué and, after leaving Canada, insulted the summit’s host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sending out tweets calling him “very dishonest and weak.”</p><p dir="ltr">Nothing like that happened in this go-round (at least as of this writing. Sitting in his cabin on Air Force One for an eight-hour flight home, Trump had ample time to grab his phone and unburden himself of any grievances he might have suppressed over the long weekend). “They’re going out of their way to accommodate his [Trump’s] whims and wishes,” Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.</p><p>Still, Trump’s counterparts made clear that if he wasn’t willing to be a partner, they might go it alone. Trump has taken a hard-line position on Iran, pulling out of an agreement reached last year by the Obama administration aimed at curbing the country’s nuclear-weapons program. He has hit the Islamic Republic with rounds of sanctions, part of a pressure campaign that has weakened its economy. After Iran downed a U.S. drone in June, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trump-increases-economic-sanctions-iran/592438/?utm_source=feed">Trump came close</a> to ordering a retaliatory military strike.</p><p>But over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron, acting independently, invited the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to the summit for private talks aimed at defusing tensions with the West. Trump didn’t talk to Zarif, but Macron did. The French president remains committed to the nuclear agreement that Trump has spurned, and<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/emmanuel-macron-floats-plan-g7-defuse-iran-tensions"> wants to ensure</a> that Iran respects the deal’s provisions, a French diplomat told <em>The Guardian</em>.</p><p>At a joint news conference today, Trump and Macron sought to downplay any differences over Iran.</p><p>“I did it on my own,” Macron said of Zarif’s appearance at the summit, adding that he kept Trump fully briefed on the diplomatic overture to Iran.</p><p>Trump had also sought to persuade his G7 counterparts to readmit Russia to the club, from which it was suspended following its annexation in 2014 of Ukraine’s Crimea. The leaders argued about it during a dinner Saturday night. Trump’s view is that Russia’s presence would be helpful in resolving disputes.</p><p>“A lot of people say having Russia, which is a power, having them inside the room is better than having them outside the room,” Trump said at the news conference with Macron.</p><p>That argument fell flat. Even his newest G7 friend, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was unmoved. “We are opposed because we see no evidence from recent Russian behavior which would warrant readmission to the G7,” a British official told me. “There has been a pattern of malign behavior from Russia—whether it’s 2016 [U.S.] election interference, the chemical attack in Salisbury [England], the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, or actions supporting the Assad regime [in Syria]—which is at odds with the principles and broader ideas around the G7.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link">Read more: <i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/boris-johnson-g7-us-eu/596785/?utm_source=feed">Boris Johnson’s balancing act</a>]</i></p><p>Next year, Trump may have more sway. The G7 will take place in the U.S., and Trump, as host, is free to invite guests, including Putin.</p><p>“Would I invite him? Certainly I would invite him,” Trump told reporters.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump never seemed all that eager to be in Biarritz. He looked distracted at times. His aides had told reporters that climate change is a “niche” issue that shouldn’t be a particular focus, perhaps the real reason Trump skipped the meeting. During back-to-back meetings with counterparts today, he took time to send out a tweet aiming to debunk <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html">an <em>Axios</em> report</a> that he had expressed interest in using nuclear weapons to break up hurricanes.</p><p>He doesn’t much like to travel, in any case, as my colleague Elaina Plott <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-never-wanted-go-davos/580834/?utm_source=feed">has reported</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">If he gets his way, he won’t be going far when the next G7 rolls around. He wants to hold it at his golf club in the Miami area. When he described the club and its amenities, the president noticeably perked up.</p><p dir="ltr">“Each country can have their own villa, or own bungalow,” he enthused.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedLudovic Marin / Pool / ReutersThe seat meant for President Trump sits empty at a meeting of G7 leaders on climate change in Biarritz, France.America’s Allies Seem to Be Moving On Without Trump2019-08-26T17:58:49-04:002019-08-26T18:22:32-04:00At the G7 meeting, leaders seemed to have given up on an agreement with him on trade, climate, and even whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is friend or foe.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-596788<p dir="ltr">At the Group of Seven meeting in Biarritz, France, there are, in effect, two different summits under way—one that’s happening in President Donald Trump’s mind, and another that is actually happening on the ground; there’s the summit Trump is trying to will into existence, and the summit unfolding in real time.</p><p dir="ltr">To hear Trump tell it, predictions that the weekend summit would be contentious were all wrong. Only the “Fake and Disgusting News” would conclude that his relations with the other leaders meeting in the coastal resort were “very tense,” he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1165499459259772928">tweeted</a>, when in fact, they were “getting along very well.” His counterparts, he insists, are coming forward and agreeing with him that it’s a good idea to readmit Russia to the group, he said today (it was tossed out in 2014 after it annexed Crimea). He’s hearing broad support for his trade dispute with China and a lunch visit yesterday with Emmanuel Macron was the best he’s had yet with his French counterpart, he said.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet in none of these instances does Trump’s version of events hold up. Pressed to name the other leaders who endorse the notion of letting Russia back in, for example, Trump demurred. “I could, but I don’t think it’s necessary,” he said. Trump’s account is even at odds with what his own government has been telling reporters: One U.S. official said that the leaders agreed that the country wasn’t yet deserving of an invitation, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-suggests-second-thoughts-about-trade-war-11566728236">according to</a> <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>. A foreign diplomat who represents one of the G7 nations told me, speaking on condition of anonymity, that Russia has done nothing since its banishment that would warrant its inclusion in a club of advanced economies with democratic systems. What’s more, senior administration officials told reporters last week, before Trump left for France, that Russia hadn’t even asked to be readmitted to the G7.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s trade war with China has meanwhile taken an ominous turn that is rattling financial markets. On Friday, Beijing said it would impose tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, prompting Trump to retaliate with a new round of tariffs and a demand that U.S. companies pull out of China.</p><p dir="ltr">Escalating trade tensions have left U.S. allies unnerved, despite Trump’s claim that his approach is winning approval at the G7. Boris Johnson, in his first face-to-face meeting with Trump since becoming prime minister, commended the overall state of the U.S. economy, but issued an unmistakable rebuke of Trump’s trade practices. Johnson told reporters that “just to register the faint, sheeplike note of our view on the trade war, we’re in favor of trade peace on the whole, and dialing it down if we can.” Asked if he would like to see “trade peace” with China, Johnson added that Britain has “profited massively” from free trade over the past two centuries. Sitting across from a U.S. president who has proudly called himself “Tariff Man,” Johnson said that “we don’t like tariffs on the whole.”</p><p dir="ltr">Even as Trump gushed about his idyllic lunch with Macron, U.S. officials were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-for-first-time-signals-regret-china-trade-war-has-escalated/2019/08/25/c942ea78-c67a-11e9-b5e4-54aa56d5b7ce_story.html">telling</a> reporters that France’s president was overly focused on “niche” issues, including climate change and the African economy.</p><p dir="ltr">While Trump has celebrated what he calls the cordial spirit at the summit, profound differences have emerged in public. At his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, Trump said he wasn’t happy about North Korea’s missile tests, but also mentioned the “very nice letter” he’d gotten just last week from the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. He suggested Kim was right to be upset about the “war games” that South Korea, America’s longtime ally, had undertaken. North Korea, he said, hadn’t violated any “agreement.” Abe took a far different tone. North Korea’s launch of short-range missiles, he said, “clearly violates the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s narrative encapsulates a larger problem: whether he can be taken at face value, means what he says, and knows his own mind. There was a heart-stopping moment during Trump’s meeting with Johnson when he signaled he was rethinking his hard-line approach to China. “Are you having second thoughts about it?<em>”</em> a reporter asked. “Yeah, sure. Why not? … I have second thoughts about everything,” Trump said. That sounded like a retreat. Was Trump admitting that he wanted a way out of the spiraling trade dispute with China?</p><p dir="ltr">But, no. Or so it seems. The White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, soon put out a statement: Trump’s comment had been “greatly misinterpreted,” she said. His regret is only that “he’s not raising the tariffs higher.” Grisham’s statement elides an important question: Whose fault is it that Trump’s comment was “misinterpreted”?</p><p dir="ltr">How is anyone to know for sure when White House policy is articulated largely through bursts of 280-character tweets, interspersed with screeds about the latest personnel moves at Fox News? (Trump found time today to send out a tweet complaining about Fox’s hiring of the longtime Democratic operative Donna Brazile.)</p><p dir="ltr">If the past is any guide, there’s another possibility: Trump meant what he said and is in fact having second thoughts when it comes to China. That sort of thing has happened before. Let’s go back in time—all the way to last week. After <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/08/21/president-trump-reversal-says-he-is-no-longer-looking-payroll-tax-cut/">wrote</a> last Monday that Trump was considering a payroll tax cut as a way to boost the economy, the White House put out a statement denying that was the case. The following day, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he was indeed mulling such a tax cut. By Wednesday, Trump said the idea was dead.</p><p dir="ltr">So who knows if Grisham’s statement is the last word or whether Trump, in the end, may pull back, as Johnson advised. At stake is more than just Trump’s reputation, but the fate of the world’s two largest economies. “It seems like he speaks off the cuff and says things and then that, in turn, becomes policy,” Simon Lester, a trade expert at the Cato Institute, told me. “Not because he put any thought into it initially, but just because he said something and then has to follow it through.”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedPool / ReutersTrump’s Two G7 Summits2019-08-25T15:33:09-04:002019-08-25T17:45:51-04:00The president’s narrative stands in stark contrast to what is happening on the ground. That raises serious questions.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-596683<p dir="ltr">It seems about as black-and-white a situation as an American president can face in this messy world of ours: hundreds of thousands of largely peaceful protesters—<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48656471">at</a> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49386298">points</a> as much as a quarter of Hong Kong’s entire population—spilling into the streets of the former British colony to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/13/asia/hong-kong-airport-protest-explained-hnk-intl/index.html">demand</a> greater democracy and resist China’s <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/hong-kong-china-2047-protests-intl-hnk/index.html">creeping control</a> over the semiautonomous region.</p><p dir="ltr">All the more so for <em>this particular</em> American president, who for <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2011/04/trump_to_china_listen_you_moth.html">nearly a decade</a> has styled himself as the man who will finally stand up to China. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, he <a href="https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1164217192512204805">looked toward</a> the heavens and suggested he was put on this Earth to challenge Beijing’s economic dealings. “I am the chosen one,” he said. “Somebody had to do it. So I’m taking on China. I’m taking on China on trade.” His administration has <a href="https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">identified</a> the struggle between free societies and authoritarian powers like China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security.” This summer, that struggle has come right up to China’s southern coast, in the beating heart of Asia.</p><p dir="ltr">As a senior Trump-administration official, who, like some others contacted for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to candidly discuss the topic, told us this week, “Hong Kong is a bellwether for China’s ability and intention to color the world in a more authoritarian hue.”</p><p dir="ltr">Yet in the throes of this hugely consequential moment, Donald Trump, no stranger to sounding off on the issues of the day, has mostly been mute. At times he seemed to condemn the people in the streets clamoring for more self-government, suggesting the demonstrations amounted to a criminal act. At least one foreign diplomat told us he is confounded by the administration’s position, sifting through the various statements from Trump, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hoping to find clarity. A nation that itself broke free from colonial control has, under Trump, struggled to come up with a clear, consistent position on a massive demonstration from people chafing at Chinese rule.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/trumps-dangerous-message-on-hong-kong/596203/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump’s foreign-policy crisis arrives</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Trump has only become more vocal in recent days amid <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/subway-protest-hong-kong-suddenly-turns-violent-n1044781">bouts</a> <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/18/asia/hong-kong-protests-weekend-intl-hnk/index.html">of violence</a> between protesters and police and an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/world/asia/hong-kong-china-troops.html">ominous buildup</a> of Chinese security forces along the border with Hong Kong. (There’s already a Chinese military garrison in Hong Kong.) Even then, however, he’s spoken out with nowhere near the fervor he devotes to <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-president-iohannis-romania-bilateral-meeting/">discussing</a> Chinese trade practices or, for that matter, the size of the crowds showing up at his rallies. </p><p dir="ltr">The seismic developments in Hong Kong mark another instance in which Trump has had to reckon with competing imperatives that may be irreconcilable: pursuing his trade agenda, and playing the American president’s traditional role of promoting democratic ideals.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump confronted a similar dilemma with Saudi Arabia. Rather than punish the Saudi leadership over the kingdom’s role in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump said that arms sales were ultimately too important to jeopardize relations with a rich ally.</p><p dir="ltr">What his approach to Hong Kong has laid bare is the extent to which Trump diverges from his predecessors in modern American history, who tended to instinctively embrace the forces of freedom, so central to America’s own founding, even if they often <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-06-11/democracy-demotion">failed to make good on</a> their lofty rhetoric in practice.</p><p dir="ltr">That’s not the way Trump is wired. What moves him personally is America’s economic growth, which he sees as a zero-sum proposition: measured by trade deficits, GDP, jobs numbers, and, perhaps most important, the stock market. In 1990, he gave an interview that revealed his thinking about clashes between authoritarian leaders and protest movements looking for democratic freedoms. His admiration was for the crackdown. China’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/springtime-in-tiananmen-square-1989/371542/?utm_source=feed">massacre</a> of civilians in Tiananmen Square the previous year was “vicious,” he <a href="https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990">declared</a> at the time, but it showed “the power of strength,” which the United States needed more of.</p><p dir="ltr">Since the demonstrations erupted in Hong Kong several months ago, Trump has put forward a muddled message about the most overt challenge to Chinese authority since Tiananmen Square. For a spell, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-khan-islamic-republic-pakistan-bilateral-meeting/">he</a> and advisers such as <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/wilbur-ross-says-hong-kong-protests-internal-matter-what-are-we-going-do-invade-1454323">Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross</a> characterized the ferment in the territory as an internal Chinese matter and flirted with a pro-Beijing stance. Trump <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-marine-one-departure-56/">used</a> the Chinese government’s preferred term of “riots,” and stated that China and Hong Kong would “have to deal with that themselves” and “don’t need advice.”</p><p dir="ltr">As the standoff <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1161360129486401547">grew</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1161325870516264961">graver</a> in mid-August, the president <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1161774305895694336">described</a> Hong Kongers’ quest for more political rights and better governance as a “problem” that China’s leader, Xi Jinping (a “good man in a ‘tough business’”), could “humanely solve.” He even <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-air-force-departure-morristown-nj/">proposed</a> a way to solve it: for Xi to meet with the leaders of the protests, and “work it out in 15 minutes.”</p><p dir="ltr">On Sunday the president struck a substantially different tone. He <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-air-force-one-departure-12/">warned</a> that any violence against protesters by Chinese forces—“another Tiananmen Square,” as he put it—would undermine negotiations to resolve the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/06/trumps-trade-war-with-china-is-changing-the-world/592411/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump’s trade war with China is already changing the world</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Still, the takeaway was more <em>don’t kill them</em> than <em>long live democracy</em>. He distanced himself a bit from concern about a Chinese crackdown. “I’m president,” he said, “but that’s a little beyond me because I think there’d be tremendous political sentiment not to do something” on a trade deal in the event the protests are crushed. He expressed “support [for] democracy,” but only after a reporter literally said the words for him: “Do you support the principles of the protestors—the pro-democracy movement?,” the journalist inquired. When he lingered on that movement, it was to marvel at the size of the crowds rather than the causes behind them: “Those are serious crowds—the Hong Kong crowds.”</p><p>The foreign diplomat interpreted Trump’s statements on Sunday as “the officials around him trying to get him back on script,” noting that the president’s tweets have “muddied the waters when it comes to figuring out what exactly is the U.S. position.”</p><p dir="ltr">The senior Trump-administration official offered a different reading of the president’s remarks. “These messages were a public, topmost amplification of things we’ve been telling the Chinese in private for many weeks now,” the official said. “We’ve been in regular contact with the Chinese about the fact that there would be consequences if China tried to use force and intervene directly in Hong Kong.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s call for Xi to dispense with Communist Party convention and engage in direct dialogue with representatives of the demonstrators, the official added, is an inspired idea. Trump was, in effect, challenging Xi to take part in the sort of dialogue that happens routinely in democratic nations, the official suggested. Still, Trump’s plan is rife with obstacles: The protest movement in Hong Kong is <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-movement-that-thrived-without-leaders-veers-out-of-control-11565795193">largely leaderless</a>, the disputes Trump claims could be sorted out in minutes have been brewing for decades, no Chinese leader has met with protesters since the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/li-peng-chinese-premier-during-tiananmen-massacre-dies-at-91/2019/07/23/f3c110b2-ad3a-11e9-bc5c-e73b603e7f38_story.html">“Butcher of Beijing” did so</a> ahead of the Tiananmen crackdown 30 years ago, and Xi <a href="https://www.csis.org/podcasts/hong-kong-brink/will-beijing-use-force">would probably</a> view such a meeting as legitimizing protests he considers a threat. As Trump himself has acknowledged, “That’s not his deal, sitting down with people.”</p><p dir="ltr">The Chinese government, for its part, <a href="https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/t1689960.shtml">has</a> <a href="https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2511_665403/t1689478.shtml">reacted</a> to Trump’s new bid to help end the crisis by hurling his prior statements back at him, with spokespeople questioning why the U.S. president would possibly proffer advice he said the parties didn’t need and suggest Xi meet with those whom Trump has recognized as rioters.</p><p dir="ltr">Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist and a prominent China hawk, maintains that the president has been “smart” to stay “above” the fray in Hong Kong and thus make it harder for the Chinese to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-claims-u-s-black-hand-is-behind-hong-kong-protests-11565356245">try and discredit</a> the demonstrations as a U.S.-orchestrated plot. “Xi has not made one comment on Hong Kong in the whole 12 weeks” of protests, he told us. “Donald Trump, through his Twitter feed, has put the international spotlight on where it should be: not on the streets of Hong Kong, but on Xi, and that Xi can resolve this.”</p><p dir="ltr">Voices in the Trump administration also caution that positioning the U.S. government squarely on the side of the demonstrators could backfire spectacularly, spurring the Chinese government to launch a violent strike aimed at forcing the demonstrators to disband.</p><p dir="ltr">A former Trump-administration official concurred that the dilemma for the president is that “the more vocal you are in favor of the opposition, the more you give the autocratic leadership the opportunity to cast it as an American-led protest.” And yet a number of the president’s <a href="https://www.voanews.com/usa/voa-interview-john-boltons-take-worlds-hotspots">current</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/NikkiHaley/status/1161706111046754313">former</a> advisers, along with <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-stand-with-hong-kong-11566341474">allies</a> <a href="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&amp;id=1192">in Congress</a>, recognize that the Hong Kong protests are a historic moment that no president should discount.</p><p dir="ltr">“Hong Kong is everything,” Bannon said. “As Berlin was to the Cold War, so Hong Kong is to the conflict we’re in with China. And we’re in a conflict.”</p><p>In an <a href="https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1159073814447308801">apparent jab</a> at the Trump administration’s initial approach to the issue, Senator Marco Rubio told us that “Hong Kong is not China’s internal affair because Beijing promised the world it would protect Hong Kong’s autonomy” as part of its <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-anniversary-china-idUSKBN19L1J1">1984 pact</a> with Britain on transferring control of the territory. If the Chinese government “cannot honor a legally binding treaty,” he argued, then why should the United States “trust its word” on trade or “retain Hong Kong’s special status?” The Florida Republican has joined other U.S. lawmakers in <a href="https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=Press-Releases&amp;id=AF5F15CE-5EBB-4D24-8406-BBE5AE88EE1A">threatening</a> to revoke Hong Kong’s favored status as an economic partner under a 1992 U.S. law, and thereby eliminate a source of enrichment for mainland China, if the Chinese government quashes the protests.</p><p>Trump, too, has at times been outspoken on matters of democracy and human rights, perhaps most prominently <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trump-learned-to-love-regime-change-venezuela/581878/?utm_source=feed">in Venezuela</a>. But a second former Trump-administration official told us that there’s actually a “deliberate” and “strategic” division of labor at play in the White House: Vice President Mike Pence tends to focus on delivering messages about liberty abroad, while Trump tends to focus on delivering messages about economic issues abroad. (Pence has been one of the administration’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/11/pence-rights-freedom-trump-singapore/576073/?utm_source=feed">foremost voices</a> on these matters, but in recent days he has <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/19/politics/mike-pence-china-hong-kong-trade/index.html">hewed</a> to Trump’s talking points on Hong Kong. The vice president <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-tells-officials-to-go-easy-on-china-over-hong-kong-11564607899">reportedly canceled</a> a planned speech on Chinese human-rights abuses earlier this summer ahead of a meeting between Trump and Xi on trade.)</p><p dir="ltr">Pence “has been vocal on those issues his entire career, so he’s the obvious, natural delivery mechanism of that message for the administration,” whereas “Trump has a greater comfort in the economic message and knows that he has to navigate some pretty prickly waters with some pretty tough hombres that lead these different countries, whether it’s Kim Jong Un or Xi,” the former official said. With Trump attempting to personally connect with such leaders and Pence taking the lead on issues related to democracy and human rights, the president has “the buffer” necessary to cut economic deals with these countries, the ex-official explained.</p><p dir="ltr">Critics would likely counter that advancing America’s economic interests and championing its values don’t always have to be mutually exclusive, and that the natural point person for promoting freedom in the U.S. government is the president, traditionally also known as the leader of the free world. If nothing else, Trump’s delegation of that role to his vice president and others in the administration suggests that it’s not his top priority. (The strategy has yet to yield any blockbuster trade deal with China.)</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/authoritarians-are-filling-vacuum-left-trump/596173/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump didn’t make the storm, but he’s making it worse</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Granted, when similar protests broke out in Hong Kong in 2014, Barack Obama also proceeded cautiously. Like <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1161325870516264961">Trump</a>, he <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/obama-china-hong-kong-112743">urged</a> the parties to refrain from violence. Like <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1161324294800121857">Trump</a>, he <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1638128/us-has-no-involvement-fostering-occupy-protest-obama-tells-xi">denied</a> any U.S. involvement in the demonstrations, <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/12/remarks-president-obama-and-president-xi-jinping-joint-press-conference">hesitating</a> to take sides. Like <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-offers-conflicting-messages-on-hong-kong-unrest-amid-u-s-china-trade-talks-11565802045">Trump</a>, he <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/obama-china-hong-kong-112743">openly juggled</a> American values and economic interests. As in Trump’s case, the president’s public utterances were only part of the story. “The Obama administration conducted the bulk of its communication privately,” for example <a href="https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/10/01/readout-national-security-advisor-susan-e-rice-s-meeting-foreign-ministe">pressing</a> China’s foreign minister behind closed doors to maintain the territory’s open system, Ryan Hass, who oversaw China policy on Obama’s National Security Council, told us. (At the time, Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/517097817702412288?lang=en">urged</a> Obama to “stay out of the Hong Kong protests” because “we have enough problems in our own country!”)</p><p dir="ltr">But there was one key distinction between then and now: the widespread assumption that the American president stood the same ground that his predecessors had for decades. So entrenched was this assumption that Joshua Wong, a young leader of the protests in Hong Kong, was disappointed when Obama merely endorsed the common human desire for the freedoms Americans hold dear and he and his fellow activists were seeking.</p><p dir="ltr">“Barack Obama’s administration gave obvious statements, as if they’re telling us, ‘Your mother is a woman,’” Wong <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1P-rMMmHRM">told</a> <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>. “Who wouldn’t know that they support Hong Kong’s democracy? Hong Kong needs more than a few words from Obama.”</p><p dir="ltr">Now, even that rhetorical support isn’t a given. “Under the current leadership of President Trump,” Wong <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2019/08/12/joshua-wong-hong-kong-protests-democracy-china-crackdown-aman.cnn">told</a> <em>CNN </em>earlier this month, “business interests or the daily life of Americans might be more important than human rights.”</p>Uri Friedmanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/uri-friedman/?utm_source=feedPeter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedHenry Nicholls / ReutersA Defining Moment for Trump’s Foreign Policy2019-08-23T07:00:00-04:002019-08-23T12:17:13-04:00A nation that itself broke free from colonial control has, under Trump, struggled to come up with a clear, consistent position on a massive demonstration from people in Hong Kong chafing at Chinese rule.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-596536<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">It’s the nightmare scenario that President Donald Trump’s camp dreads most: an economic downturn that steadily intensifies as the 2020 election nears. What would it mean for Trump if, by the fall of 2020, the jobless rate had doubled, economic growth was hovering at an anemic 1 percent, and, with no end in sight for the trade war with China, the stock market was plunging? A president whose argument for reelection rests on a healthy economy would suddenly find that his rationale has collapsed, right along with voters’ retirement funds.</p><p dir="ltr">“Does every presidential campaign worry about a downturn in the second and third quarter of an election year? You bet your ass they do,” said one Trump confidant, who, like some others contacted for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the subject candidly.</p><p dir="ltr">However much people may dislike Trump as a person, they’ve been <a href="https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/19305NBCWSJAugustSocialTrendsPoll.pdf?mod=article_inline">largely satisfied with his management of the economy</a>. A recession risks knocking out one of the main pillars sustaining him politically. Inside the White House, aides are split over whether one is coming and, if so, what exactly to do about it. What’s clear is that a recession would test the loyalty of voters who’ve forgiven Trump for any number of indiscretions and outrages that would have toppled most other politicians. But even if Trump’s supporters turn out to the polls next year, that’s not enough to ensure his victory.</p><p dir="ltr">“Human beings who can get to the polls will vote,” Frank Luntz, a longtime pollster, told me. Interest in the election will be so fevered, Luntz quipped, that “a lot of dead people are going to come back to life to vote.”</p><p dir="ltr">In the end, the race may hinge on the preferences of some 5 to 10 percent of the electorate who are unattached to either party and whose perceptions of the economy could decide Trump’s fate.</p><p dir="ltr">“I don’t think people win elections with their base; I think they win elections by getting people in the middle,” Robert Grand, who was part of the fundraising team for Trump’s 2016 campaign, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">The president’s campaign advisers tell me that Trump would like to pose the question made famous by Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”<em> </em>If the answer isn’t a ringing <em>yes</em>, Trump could be facing a one-term presidency. Worse for him, even if the answer is a ringing <em>yes</em>, he may have so alienated voters for other reasons that the economic argument might not be enough to push him over the top in November 2020.</p><p dir="ltr">Tucked into a new <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/half-of-americans-disapprove-of-trumps-response-to-mass-shootings-11566133320"><em>Wall Street Journal</em>–NBC News survey</a> was, for Trumpworld, a worrying omen. The poll found that by a whopping margin of 73 percent to 5 percent, the subset of voters who don’t approve of Trump but still like how he’s handled the economy favor a Democratic candidate over the president. Trump can’t write off these voters—or any voters, for that matter. Demographic trends simply don’t work in his favor. Luntz told me that if Trump suffers no defections in 2020 and locks in every person who voted for him in 2016, he could still lose the electoral college and, hence, the election. That’s because younger voters who are casting ballots for the first time prefer Democrats over Republicans by a decisive margin, and some of Trump’s older voters will have died by the time November 3, 2020, rolls around, Luntz said. “Trump must win people who didn’t vote for him,” he told me. “And the way he’s going to do that, the only way he’s going to do that, is through the economy.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/whys-it-so-awkward-to-say-the-economy-is-great/595408/?utm_source=feed">Read: Why no one wants to talk about the booming economy</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">As always, but especially right now, the economy is a wild card. Signs point to a coming slowdown, though it’s difficult to pinpoint either its severity or its timing. Last week, the returns on short-term U.S. bonds surpassed those of long-term bonds, a development that typically signals a looming recession. Financial markets have been whipsawed by Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war with China.</p><p dir="ltr">Stephen Moore, a former campaign adviser whom Trump had wanted to nominate for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board this spring, but who pulled out when it became clear he couldn’t win Senate confirmation, told me that Trump’s trade dispute with China is hurting the economy, if only in the short term. “Of course it is,” Moore said. “I talk to businessmen and women, and they say that the trade war has hurt their orders. It has hurt their capital spending.” I asked Moore about Trump’s contention that the tariffs he has imposed on China are helping the U.S. at China’s expense. “That’s kind of spin from the president—trying to make a case for what he’s doing,” Moore told me. “There are some positive aspects from tariffs … but those benefits are clearly upset by the wrench of uncertainty that has been thrown into the economy by the tariffs.”</p><p dir="ltr">Indeed, a <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-08/55551-CBO-outlook-update.pdf">Congressional Budget Office report released yesterday</a> concluded that Trump’s tariffs will “lower economic output” by making consumer and other goods more expensive. Further, the “uncertainty” produced by Trump’s trade practices will reduce business investment, though that impact will taper off after 2020 once business makes adjustments to deal with the costs triggered by the tariffs, the report showed. Still, if the tariffs are still driving up costs by 2020, that’s troublesome for Trump’s reelection effort.</p><p dir="ltr">No consensus has emerged inside the White House about the economy’s direction. As ever, aides are divided and quarreling about whether a downturn is coming and what the antidote might be. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told donors at a private fundraiser in Wyoming this week that if the United States endured a recession, it would be “moderate and short,” <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/20/donald-trump-gop-donors-recession-1470360">according to <em>Politico</em></a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump told reporters Tuesday that he was exploring a payroll-tax cut and other measures that might boost the economy. Yesterday he backtracked: No tax cuts were needed, he told reporters. Other Trump advisers had privately dismissed the notion of tax cuts, saying they would never get through Congress. Besides, the prognosis may not be so grim, these people say. John McLaughlin, one of the president’s pollsters, told me that people are not as fearful of losing their jobs as they were in the years before Trump took office. “Main Street,” he said, “is feeling good about the economy. The majority of Americans think it’s still getting better. The strength of the president’s job approval is that the economy is growing.”</p><p dir="ltr">Heading toward the election, Trump wouldn’t mind a little more growth. He’s found a villain to serve up to voters anxious about their financial condition: the guy he appointed to chair the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell. In recent days, Trump has stepped up his demonization of Powell, accusing him of sabotaging the economy by not cutting interest rates more aggressively. Yesterday he tweeted, “The only problem we have is Jay Powell and the Fed. He’s like a golfer who can’t putt, has no touch … So far, he has called it wrong and only let us down.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/dont-root-for-a-recession/596500/?utm_source=feed">Derek Thompson: Don’t root for a recession</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Set aside the fairness of that claim, or the propriety of giving someone a job and then undercutting him in the public eye when, for practical purposes, Powell can’t defend himself. Forget for a moment whether it’s appropriate for a president to browbeat an independent central bank. Or, for that matter, whether a president should personalize a dispute over monetary policy and expose Powell to public wrath. Trump is also going down a path that could set a dangerous precedent: pressuring the Fed to take steps that would be manifestly helpful to the sitting president in an election season.</p><p dir="ltr">Ironically, before he took office, Trump criticized the Fed for just this sort of politicized decision making. In September 2016, two months before the election, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/12/trump-says-fed-chief-yellen-should-be-ashamed.html">Trump accused then–Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen</a> of deliberately keeping interest rates low to inflate the stock market and burnish President Barack Obama’s legacy. It was a baseless claim, but it revealed something about Trump’s thinking: The Fed is another useful tool of incumbency. With the presidency up for grabs, Trump is seeing if he can’t press the Fed into service, juicing the economy in ways that might potentially win the loyalty of that sliver of voters who don’t like his style but are happy that 401(k)s are rising on his watch.</p><p dir="ltr">“When they go to the ballot box in November of 2020, no one will say, ‘Hey, do you remember when on August 14 the Dow dropped 800 points? I’m not voting for Trump,’” the Trump confidant told me. “They’ll say<em>, ‘</em>In the totality of four years, am I better off than I was four years ago?’ And they’ll vote for the guy.”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / ReutersPresident Donald Trump appears to be betting it all on the economy.Trump’s Riskiest Bet2019-08-22T05:00:00-04:002019-08-22T12:27:51-04:00That old truism of American politics—“It’s the economy, stupid”—could come back to haunt the money-minded president in 2020.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-595828<p class="dropcap">Early this morning, President Donald Trump—perhaps unwittingly—encapsulated the core tension that has consumed much of his first term: He’s a leader perpetually torn between his desire for bipartisan deal making and his overriding fear of losing his electoral base.</p><p>Now, on the issue of gun control, the president’s aides suspect, those twin concerns may be irreconcilable.</p><p>“Serious discussions are taking place between House and Senate leadership on meaningful Background Checks,” Trump tweeted. “I have also been speaking to the NRA, and others, so that their very strong views can be fully represented and respected.”</p><p>Following a pair of mass shootings last weekend that killed more than 30 people in Texas and Ohio, the president is—for the moment—leaning in to an effort to pass new gun laws through Congress. He quickly endorsed the idea of “red-flag” laws that would allow judges to order the removal of guns from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. He has also renewed his periodic (though often fleeting) interest in strengthening background checks, a long-standing priority for Democrats and advocates of tighter restrictions on guns.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/congress-pass-gun-laws/595534/?utm_source=feed">Read: A rare gun-control proposal that could unite Congress</a>]</i></p><p>Speaking with reporters outside the White House before leaving for fundraising events in the Hamptons, Trump this morning repeatedly said that he wants to impose what he called “meaningful” background checks that would keep guns away from “bad people, dangerous people.”</p><p>“I think the Republicans are going to lead the charge, along with the Democrats,” Trump said.</p><p>Perhaps most significant, Trump’s movement is causing Republicans on Capitol Hill to shift, creating a new window of opportunity for proposals that have stalled in Congress. <a href="https://whas.iheart.com/featured/terry-meiners/content/2019-08-08-mcconnell-checks-in-from-twitter-jail-on-gun-reform-home-protests-more/">In an interview with a local radio station in Kentucky</a>, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a staunch supporter of gun rights, said a debate over red-flag laws and background checks would be “front and center” when lawmakers return from their August recess next month. McConnell rejected calls to bring the Senate back early, and he wouldn’t commit to passage or even a vote on either issue. But it was significant that the majority leader acknowledged the overwhelming support in public polling for stronger background checks and signaled a genuine desire to pass legislation out of the Senate. “What we can’t do is fail to pass something. By just locking up and failing to pass, that’s unacceptable,” McConnell said. “What I want to see here is an outcome and not just a bunch of partisan back-and-forths, shots across the bow.”</p><p>Yet the president, in his tweets and in his comments to reporters, is not vowing an all-out fight with the National Rifle Association, the gun-rights lobbying group that has mobilized both legislators and voters against new restrictions for decades. Trump said he hoped to win over the NRA and its CEO, Wayne LaPierre. “I think in the end Wayne and the NRA will either be there or maybe will be a little bit more neutral,” Trump said. “And that would be okay, too.”</p><p>Though hobbled by internal strife and multiple state investigations, the NRA has given no indication it plans to stand down. And Trump’s unwillingness to battle the organization in the past has left both Democrats and his own aides skeptical that this time will be different. “Dems have been down this path before with the president only for the NRA and Republicans to rein him back in, so we’re cautious,” said one Democratic congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid perspective.</p><p>Advocates for stronger gun laws are similarly hesitant to cheer the latest developments, even as they argue that the politics around gun control are finally turning in their favor. “It’s clear that President Trump and Mitch McConnell are starting to feel that pressure,” said Robin Lloyd, the managing director of Giffords, the organization launched by former Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. The group today aired a television ad in Kentucky urging McConnell to bring the Senate back into session. “It’s too early to tell how this is going to play out,” Lloyd said in an interview.</p><p>Indeed, Trump has flirted with expanded background checks before, only to pull back in the face of pressure from the gun lobby and from conservative voices on Capitol Hill and inside his own White House. In February 2018, after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people, Trump invited students and parents to the White House to discuss gun violence. He used the occasion to tout a plan to arm teachers and coaches (a plan favored by the NRA), but he also made a case for expanding background checks on people purchasing guns. He said that “we’re going to be very strong on background checks. We’re going to be doing very strong background checks.”</p><p dir="ltr">It never happened.</p><p dir="ltr">If anything, the White House had been moving in the opposite direction prior to last weekend’s massacres in Dayton and El Paso. In February, for example, the White House threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would have expanded background checks.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/trumps-tense-visit-dayton-after-mass-shooting/595681/?utm_source=feed">Read: The baggage Trump brought to Dayton</a>]</i></p><p>“Background checks, gun control, and Second Amendment issues are the third rail in Republican politics—as much as abortion is in Democrat politics,” said a senior Trump-administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue more freely.</p><p>As for what action might come, the official said, “All available options will be explored. Someone will put together both legislative and executive-actions options, and we’ll see what’s politically feasible on the Hill.”</p><p>Trump’s advisers have also pointed out that the shooters in El Paso and Dayton passed background checks, making it unlikely that the House bill would have stopped them.</p><p>Trump spoke with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer separately by phone yesterday, and the two leaders said that while they received no commitment from the president, he agreed to review the background-checks bill the House passed earlier in the year. It’s unlikely that bill would win over enough Republicans in the Senate, but there is discussion about reviving the compromise proposal from Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. That bill fell short following the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.</p><p>As one senior Republican aide put it yesterday, “I think Trump is serious until he sees that his base will lose their minds over it.”</p><p>For any significant gun-control measures to pass, the president will need to make a sustained push in private and in public—not just now, but through the lengthy August recess and into September. And based on recent history, both parties have reasons to doubt that will happen.</p>Russell Bermanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/russell-berman/?utm_source=feedPeter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedElaina Plotthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedJose Luis Magana / APPresident Trump's back-and-forth messaging on guns is yielding skepticism.Trump’s Own Aides Doubt His Latest Push on Guns2019-08-09T12:04:38-04:002019-08-09T14:17:48-04:00And Democrats do, too.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-595681<p>DAYTON, Ohio—Fifteen minutes after Air Force One touched down here this morning, a fight nearly broke out on the same city block where a gunman shot and killed nine people on Sunday. A middle-aged white man waving a large blue <span class="smallcaps">Trump 2020</span> flag traded angry insults with a cluster of people chanting, “Vote him out!”</p><p dir="ltr">“We don’t want you here!” one woman shouted.</p><p dir="ltr">“God bless Trump!” he proclaimed.</p><p dir="ltr">“If you support Trump, you’re a racist!” someone else yelled.</p><p dir="ltr">“You’re an idiot!” the Trump supporter snapped back.</p><p dir="ltr">The confrontation unfolded in front of Ned Peppers Bar, where the 24-year-old gunman was shot by police before he could enter and possibly kill dozens more people who had rushed inside to escape his gunfire. In the days after the shooting, the block in the city’s hip Oregon District had become a gathering spot for people looking to grieve and console one another. All along the brick sidewalk, children had drawn hearts with blue and pink chalk. People have been posting sticky notes on storefronts. “Kindness will win,” read one. “Stamp out hate,” read another.</p><p dir="ltr">With the White House divulging no details about President Donald Trump’s itinerary in advance, scores of people descended on the crime scene this morning on the off chance that he would show up, intending to protest or thank him. But Trump stayed away. Instead he went to a local hospital where he met with some of the shooting victims. It was an unusual trip by the president’s standards: He was barely visible. He made no public appearances. White House pool reporters, who were barred from accompanying Trump within the hospital, didn’t see him until he returned to Air Force One. After two and a half hours in the city, he took an afternoon flight to El Paso, the site of the weekend’s other, even deadlier mass shooting.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/rodney-davis-shooting/595636/?utm_source=feed">Read: ‘There will be a next time’: A GOP congressman talks about gun violence</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Dayton seemed split over whether it wanted the president to come at all. Normally, presidential visits following a national tragedy are widely welcomed, and they follow a familiar pattern: The president arrives, shakes hands with local leaders, and delivers a consoling message.</p><p dir="ltr">But in Dayton, it was clear before Trump’s arrival that he brought so much baggage to the task, it would be nearly impossible for him to pull it off. The danger was that he would redirect attention away from the community he was supposed to comfort. Which is what happened: Trump is the most polarizing president of modern times, and the visit wound up aggravating tensions rather than unifying a stricken city.</p><p dir="ltr">Early this morning, former Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, spoke with reporters near the bar. Asked about Trump’s appearance, he sounded wary. Trump had <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/trumps-inconsistent-response-el-paso-and-dayton/595483/?utm_source=feed">delivered a scripted speech</a> in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room on Monday denouncing bigotry and emphasizing mental illness and violent video games as root causes of gun violence. Then, after the teleprompter was packed away, he reverted to partisan attacks. Last night, he spent time on Twitter mocking the poll numbers of the Democratic presidential candidate and Trump critic Beto O’Rourke, whose former congressional district includes El Paso. This morning, he complained about <em>The New York Times</em>’ headline writing.</p><p dir="ltr">I asked Kasich about Trump’s behavior following the speech. “Look, as a leader, sometimes you have to have a stiff upper lip,” said Kasich, whose term ended earlier this year. “You can’t be a sensitive, thin-skinned operator … You’ve got to be bigger than other people, and not take the bait.”</p><p dir="ltr">Within just a few hours, Trump’s appearance in Dayton predictably devolved into a bitter dispute. After Trump toured the hospital with Mayor Nan Whaley and Senator Sherrod Brown, the two Democrats held a televised news conference and spoke critically about him. “A lot of the time, his talk can be very divisive, and that’s the last thing we need in Dayton,” Whaley said. Watching TV en route to El Paso, Trump tweeted insults at both. “Their news conference after I left for El Paso was a fraud,” Trump wrote.</p><p dir="ltr">Feelings on the street were raw. During another Kasich press interview, Luong Vo, 69, sat behind him on a bicycle, holding a sign that read <span class="smallcaps">save Our City</span>. Like others in the Rust Belt, Dayton has struggled. Since 1980, its population has fallen to 141,000, a 27 percent decrease. Dayton <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/04/help-not-handcuffs-how-us-cities-on-the-frontline-are-fighting-to-stem-the-opioid-tide">recorded 577 </a>deaths from opioid overdoses in 2017, one of the highest in the nation per capita. Ken Dillingham, the pastor of LifeWay church, told me that church staff carry the medication Narcan in case of an overdose.</p><p dir="ltr">As Kasich walked off, Vo stopped him and, in anguished tones, told him that the city is in crisis. Kasich put a hand on his shoulder. “There are more jobs down here, more businesses,” said the ex-governor, who lost to Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. “Politicians are destroying the city,” Vo said.</p><p dir="ltr">“I understand. I’m frustrated with politicians too,” Kasich replied. “Glad I’m not one now.” At that, he left for a TV appearance.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/the-difficulties-of-fighting-white-nationalism/595609/?utm_source=feed">Read: The fight against white nationalism is different</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The night before Trump’s arrival, I walked through the Oregon District, which seemed to be hovering between grief and recovery. I watched a young woman rest both hands over her heart and cry silently as she stared at a makeshift memorial outside the bar consisting of candles and flowers. A young man put an arm around her. A trio of women walked up and down the street with therapy dogs in tow. Pointing to her seven-year-old Rottweiler, Josey, Hollee Russell told me: “She seems to pick out the ones who need her the most.” On the next block, people stood on the outdoor patio of a bar, drinking and smiling, getting on with life.</p><p dir="ltr">Though they were unified in wanting the city to heal, the people I spoke with were divided over whether Trump’s visit would help make that happen. Trump carried Ohio in the 2016 general election, but he defeated Hillary Clinton in Montgomery County, which contains Dayton, by less than 1 percentage point. It wasn’t hard to see why the race here was so close.</p><p dir="ltr">“I’m glad he’s coming. It’s comforting for those who live nearby and do support him and are Dayton residents,” said 40-year-old Amanda Cummins. “This is my neighborhood. I’m devastated by this. Mentally, it’s affecting a lot of us.”</p><p dir="ltr">Nearby, I spoke with Ron and Robb Sloan Anderson, Dayton residents who have made a point of visiting the Oregon District to eat dinner and show support for local businesses in the wake of the shootings. “As for Trump’s visit, we don’t want it. He can stay in D.C. I say send him home,” Robb said. “He’s racist, he’s homophobic, he’s xenophobic, he’s a womanizer. We all know that.”</p><p dir="ltr">Behind them was a mother, 36-year-old Sasha Hobbs, and her two sons. One of the boys, a 6-year-old, held a sign that read <span class="smallcaps">Free hugs</span>.</p><p dir="ltr">After each hug, the boy would rush to his mother and proudly report the new tally: “120 hugs! … 121 hugs! … 122!”</p><p dir="ltr">“It teaches my kids compassion,” she explained, when I went over to talk with her. “I’m all about teaching my kids to grow up and be good people.”</p><p dir="ltr">And Trump? Did she want him to come?</p><p dir="ltr">“I’m on the fence,” she said.</p><p dir="ltr">On that point so, it seemed, was Dayton.</p><p dir="ltr"><em>Christian Paz contributed reporting.</em></p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedBryan Woolston / ReutersThe Baggage Trump Brought to Dayton2019-08-07T18:35:43-04:002019-08-08T08:06:17-04:00The city is hovering between grief and recovery. The president didn’t unite it.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-595483<p dir="ltr"><small><em>Updated on August 5, 2019 at 4:38 p.m. ET</em></small><br><br>
In a moment when Donald Trump’s presumed task was to comfort and unify Americans, he instead risked causing confusion: His speech about the weekend’s pair of mass shootings undercut his own proposal for confronting gun violence that he’d tweeted just three hours before.</p><p dir="ltr">Consistency has rarely been this president’s strong suit, especially in the aftermath of tragedy. He often leaves Americans scrambling to understand which of his various statements reflect his sincere beliefs about the event in question. Should they look to his tweets as a framework for understanding how he thinks the White House should respond? Or should his more formal remarks serve as a North Star?</p><p dir="ltr">It has been less than 48 hours since the latest mass shooting in America, and already voters have heard Trump contradict himself on how the country should move forward. What he does next, then, could help clarify whether this administration will take any action at all to try to curb mass shootings. Given the hodgepodge of ideas Trump has tossed out in just the past eight hours, the question now is which one he decides to stick to—or whether he simply moves on.</p><p dir="ltr">“He’s willing to have a presidential moment and read a carefully crafted speech that hits high notes. He did so in Las Vegas after the mass shooting, for example,” a former White House official told us, referring to Trump’s remarks after the 2017 massacre at a music festival, where he spoke about the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/02/politics/donald-trump-full-statement-las-vegas-shooting/index.html">“comfort of our common humanity”</a> in times of tragedy. “But many in the media won’t focus on the speech text, and he’ll find something he doesn’t like in the coverage, and then things will devolve quickly from there,” the official added. “If past is prelude, that sort of scenario plays out yet again.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/el-paso-and-dayton-shootings-donald-trumps-reaction/595429/?utm_source=feed">Read: No one knows Trump’s next move</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The president started his morning with a call to action, tweeting that Americans could not let the shooting victims “die in vain” and urging Republicans and Democrats to “come together” to pass “strong background checks.” The message mirrored his state of mind following the 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida: Then, as this morning, his impulse was to seize on gun-control measures, defying Republican orthodoxy.</p><p dir="ltr">After Parkland, Trump met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers at the White House and seemed to embrace legislation from Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California to ban assault weapons. With TV cameras rolling, Trump chided lawmakers for being “petrified” of the National Rifle Association. Yet he later pulled back, throwing his support behind an NRA-supported proposal to arm schoolteachers.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump changed course today in a similar fashion, largely reverting to the party line on gun violence. In a 10 a.m. ET speech from the White House, he told Americans to “stop the glorification of violence in our society,” including “the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.” He blamed the internet as a source of radicalization. And he tasked Congress with reforming mental-health laws “to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence,” help them get treatment, and, “when necessary,” place them in involuntary confinement. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger,” he concluded, “not the gun.” (Though he did reference the white-supremacist ideology of the El Paso shooter, he did not acknowledge how the alleged killer’s language, in his manifesto, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/el-paso-and-dayton-shootings-donald-trumps-reaction/595429/?utm_source=feed">echoed his own</a>.) Background checks, the subject of his morning tweet, went unmentioned. By the afternoon, the NRA had released <a href="https://www.nraila.org/articles/20190805/nra-welcomes-call-to-address-root-causes-of-violence">a statement</a> “welcom[ing] the President’s call to address the root causes of the horrific acts of violence that have occurred in our country.”</p><p dir="ltr">In an especially odd moment, as Trump was wrapping up his remarks, he bungled the location of the weekend’s second mass shooting, asking God to “bless the memory of those who perished in Toledo”—not Dayton. But such a mistake was perhaps inevitable with the president speaking words that were so clearly not his, as our colleague David Graham <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/five-things-trump-blaming-el-paso/595492/?utm_source=feed">described</a> earlier today. Trump giving public remarks that diverge from the message he’s sent out with his own thumbs isn’t a new phenomenon: He has shown repeatedly that the words he reads off a teleprompter—written by staff members who may have another agenda—are not necessarily what he genuinely believes. </p><p dir="ltr">“I’m sure they’d been working on this speech, and he was tweeting on his own,” said a second former senior White House official, who, like others we interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid.</p><p dir="ltr">Two years ago, Trump appeared in the same space, the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room, and gave a speech about the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counterprotester dead. He seemed to say the right things, denouncing racism and calling white supremacists “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” But what he actually believed sprang into view the following day, when he gave an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower in New York City. From the lobby of his building, in one of the most infamous and polarizing moments of his presidency, he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the confrontation.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/white-terrorism-must-be-stopped/595471/?utm_source=feed">Read: White-nationalist terrorism must be stopped</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">A test of Trump’s interest in curbing mass shootings will be which script he follows in the coming days and weeks. Mass shootings have “become a major national problem right now that needs real answers,” Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential biographer, told us. “It’s not just a question of rhetoric. It’s much more about actions—which, in this partisan environment, will be very difficult. Something more than rhetoric is necessary.”</p><p dir="ltr">According to a third former senior White House official, Trump’s instinct to promote stricter gun measures stems from genuine feelings of distress and helplessness. “It actually does affect him more than people would probably expect,” the official told us. Consider his unscripted comments as he gathered with lawmakers after Parkland. Referring specifically to tighter gun-control laws, he urged the group: “We have to do something about it. We have to act.”</p><p dir="ltr">But then consider those words in light of a speech he delivered at the NRA convention in April, in which <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/trump-nra-speech-arms-treaty/588214/?utm_source=feed">he assured the gun lobby</a> that he is “a champion” of the Second Amendment. “It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “It’s under assault, but not when we’re here. Not even close.”</p><p dir="ltr">Two of the former officials suggested that, after mass shootings, Trump falls prey to the same amnesia that so many other Americans do: He feels an urgency to act in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, but then finds that urgency muted as time goes on and the next day’s headlines roll in. (Since his speech this morning, Trump has tweeted about “historic currency manipulation” in China four times.)</p><p dir="ltr">The first former official argued that Trump undercuts his own message because he becomes preoccupied by the same grievances that dictate so much of his presidency. “I found he was often willing to be led by higher purposes and more noble impulses, if urged by those around him: healing, unity, moral clarity,” this person said. But it rarely lasted. “That orientation was quickly discarded if he was criticized or didn’t get the credit he thought he deserved, or something [else] served as a distraction.”</p>Elaina Plotthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedPeter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedLeah Millis / ReutersTrump’s Habit of Contradicting Himself After a Tragedy2019-08-05T16:14:16-04:002019-08-05T17:31:18-04:00What should the country believe: his speech or his tweets?tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-595429<p><small><em>Updated on August 4, 2019 at 4:26 p.m. ET</em></small></p><p>It was a part of the presidency that would come to surprise Bill Clinton, if only because of its heartrending frequency. Soon after the gun massacre at Columbine High School in the spring of 1999, Clinton flew to Littleton, Colorado, to talk with students, teachers, and parents mourning the deaths of the 13 victims. So much of his job, he told the audience, centered on a task that had nothing to do with his constitutional duties: comforting survivors of mass shootings. “More than we ever could have imagined,” he said, his role was “to be with grieving people.”</p><p dir="ltr">That’s not something that comes naturally to President Donald Trump. Consoling a nation calls for empathy and eloquence; Trump hasn’t shown much capacity for either. Presidents often use scripture as a balm when people are hurting; Trump seems little moved by religious faith or feeling. Part of a president’s job is to be a unifying figure in times of national crisis. After 30 divisive months in office, Trump could be past the point where he can take on that role. The question now is whether his countrymen even expect him to.</p><p dir="ltr">So far, Trump’s response to this weekend’s mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, has been uneven. He’s sent out the obligatory condolences and offers of federal assistance via Twitter. But he has also taken time to tweet favorably about two of his political supporters. A full day has passed since the El Paso shooting without Trump making a live statement on camera, though he made <a href="https://twitter.com/Kevinliptakcnn/status/1158026195772026881">a cameo at a private wedding</a> at his golf club in New Jersey, where he spent the weekend.</p><p dir="ltr">As mass shootings have become commonplace in this country, Americans have grown used to seeing their presidents try to play a healing role. It’s a norm that Trump’s predecessors helped cultivate. Former President Barack Obama built his legacy partly on his memorable response to gun violence. The day of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting in December 2012, he teared up while addressing the press about the massacre of schoolchildren. Three years later, he led mourners in singing “Amazing Grace” while giving a eulogy for the pastor killed at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina.</p><p dir="ltr">In Littleton that day in 1999, Clinton delivered a speech designed to soothe the community, closing with a story about Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who became South Africa’s first black president after serving nearly three decades in prison. Mandela was filled with anger over his confinement, but resolved never to surrender to his jailers his “mind and his heart.” Looking out at students who had heard the gunshots at Columbine and seen their classmates fall, Clinton said: “I see here today that you have decided not to give your mind and your heart away. I ask you now to share it with all your fellow Americans.”</p><p dir="ltr">Republican President George W. Bush gave a short and powerful speech at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, after the 2007 mass shooting on campus that left 32 people dead. One day after the violence, Bush traveled to the school to speak at a memorial service held in the basketball arena. “People who have never met you are praying for you. They’re praying for your friends who have fallen and who are injured,” Bush said. “There’s a power in these prayers—real power. In times like this, we can find comfort in the grace and guidance of a loving God. As the scriptures tell us, ‘Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/el-paso-shooting-how-can-we-police-ideology/595426/?utm_source=feed">Read: Ideology kills. How do you police it?</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Gun violence is so routine in the United States that becoming numb to reports of the latest tragedy is easy. But in their senseless lethality, there was something especially harrowing about this weekend’s shootings. One mass shooting piled atop another in the space of half a day, reinforcing the creeping sense that no public space is safe. Twenty people died at a Walmart in El Paso, and another nine were murdered outside a bar in a popular neighborhood in Dayton. More than four dozen were injured between the two episodes.</p><p dir="ltr">In any other administration, it would fall to the president to reassure a jittery nation. But does the country, at this moment, think Trump has that in him? Does enough of the nation see in him a truly national leader who can bind up fresh wounds? Polling has repeatedly shown that he is the most polarizing president in the modern era. A Gallup survey evaluating Trump’s second year in office found that the gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ approval of him was a whopping 79 points—the largest ever recorded. His approval rating in 2018, at about 40 percent, was the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/245996/trump-job-approval-sets-new-record-polarization.aspx">lowest for any second-year president</a> since World War II, Gallup reported. In a sign of how people view Trump as a moral figure, a <a href="https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2609">Quinnipiac University poll</a> from March showed that by a margin of 72 percent to 21 percent, voters said Trump was not a good role model for children.</p><p dir="ltr">Public opinion of the president seems to track with his own conception of his job: He doesn’t carry himself as someone who necessarily wants to preside over all Americans; invariably, his focus is his core voters.</p><p dir="ltr">“What you want in a moment like this is somebody to be able to rise above partisanship, rise above the political concerns and be able to be the president of all the people," Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential biographer, told me. “And that has been, so far, not the way the president has handled the presidency. He's spent time solidifying his base. You keep hoping for those moments when he'll reach beyond that base and expand it so the country can feel that he's their president, too. This is one of those moments when there’s a great desire for that.”</p><p dir="ltr">And his compassion is conditional. When parts of California, a deep-blue state, were scorched by wildfires last year, Trump threatened to cut off federal aid, saying without evidence that the state had mismanaged funds. Just days ago, he <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/08/02/747615349/rep-cummings-says-someone-tried-to-break-into-his-home-too-bad-trump-says">seemed to gloat</a> upon hearing the news about an attempted break-in at the home of Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings.</p><p dir="ltr">Anything Trump says about the shooting in El Paso in particular risks reigniting a debate about whether his own rhetoric fuels such acts of violence. Authorities are investigating an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html">online manifesto</a> allegedly posted by the white male suspect, part of which refers to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Trump has used similar language: In a <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1090986128805687296">tweet from January</a>, he said that troops sent to the border with Mexico would be stopping “the attempted invasion of illegals.” He’s referred to an “invasion” in <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-national-security-humanitarian-crisis-southern-border-2/">multiple</a> public <a href="https://www.reuters.com/video/2019/05/09/trump-calls-migrant-caravans-invasion-at?videoId=547721354">remarks</a> since then, too. But he’d <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-02/domestic-terrorism-white-supremacy">paid little heed</a> to the sort of homegrown domestic terrorism that’s given rise to mass killings.</p><p dir="ltr">In the hours after the shootings, Trump stuck to Twitter, sending out a series of brief messages voicing condolences. “God bless the people of El Paso, Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1157988680851689473">said</a> this morning, following <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1157987941182033920">a tweet</a> about how the FBI is working with state and local law enforcement. Yesterday, though, there was an oddly discordant message that Trump, for some reason, believed couldn’t wait. Minutes after writing that there were “many killed” in El Paso, he tweeted about an Ultimate Fighting Championship match that would take place that night involving one of his supporters, Colby Covington. “Fight hard tonight, Colby. You are a real Champ!” Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1157749132209115136">wrote</a>, as El Paso treated the wounded and recovered the dead.</p><p dir="ltr">Covington won the match.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedMandel Ngan / Stephen Jaffe / AFP / Getty / Gerald Herbert / AP / The AtlanticNo One Knows Trump’s Next Move2019-08-04T13:58:02-04:002019-08-04T18:07:28-04:00Part of a president’s job is to be a unifying figure in times of national crisis. This president could be past the point where he can take on that role.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-595207<p>BALTIMORE—Everyone was in place. TV camera crews had set up their tripods early this morning on a scraggly patch of grass facing a boarded-up rowhouse. Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, would be arriving any minute for a news conference that his agency had quickly arranged in a blighted pocket of West Baltimore represented by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings.</p><p dir="ltr">For days, President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/trump-elijah-cummings/594955/?utm_source=feed">has been tweeting</a> about Cummings, casting him as the overlord of rat-infested neighborhoods unfit for human habitation. It wasn’t clear ahead of time what Carson would say or why he had shown up. But the photo op didn’t seem to go as planned. If Trump had been hoping that Carson would reinforce his message that Cummings is a villain and West Baltimore a slum, the HUD chief didn’t deliver. Nor did he offer the sort of full-throated defense Trump might have expected.</p><p dir="ltr">The photo op was off the rails before it even began. Carson’s team would soon find out that the Morning Star Baptist Church of Christ owns the property where the secretary was to stand. Gregory Evans, 71, is a member of the church, and this morning, he was near the entrance, minding who was coming and going while children took part in a Bible-school session inside. He walked over and told Carson’s entourage that they hadn’t asked for approval to use the land—and needed to leave. <em>Could they just stay and hold their news conference if no one had a problem with that?</em> one of the housing department aides asked. Evans was emphatic: <em>No.</em> That settled it. Carson’s advance team, the TV camera crews, the print reporters, and I all packed up and replanted ourselves about 30 yards away.</p><p dir="ltr">“Why did someone come onto church property without permission?” Evans asked us, as he shooed us away. “This community needs some support on all kinds of issues—on dilapidated housing and everything else. All of a sudden you’re going to show up on our property and not even ask permission to be here?”</p><p dir="ltr">A few minutes later, Carson arrived. He had invited Cummings to join him, but the congressman declined. Cummings’s office said the invitation came last night and he couldn’t rearrange his schedule.</p><p dir="ltr">Carson had been briefed on the kerfuffle with the church and was none too happy, using it to make a broader point about vanishing civility. “It’s a church!” he said. “They say, ‘Get off my property.’ A church! … This is the level to which we have sunk as a society.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/donald-trump-twitter-attacks-2020/595099/?utm_source=feed">Read: When the president lashes out</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Carson spoke for about 20 minutes, making a statement about how he had watched Baltimore’s uneven progress while working as a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital and then taking a few questions. He’s in an uncomfortable spot from which there is no easy escape. He’s the lone African American Cabinet secretary serving a president whose attacks on people of color are now commonplace. And implicitly, the president’s demonization of Cummings is an attack on Carson’s agency: HUD. Carson said at the news conference that $16 billion in federal money has flowed to Baltimore in the past year alone. Without providing evidence, Trump has said that funds have been “stolen.” Even if that were true, isn’t it his administration’s job to properly account for the money and ensure that it was properly spent? (Carson, asked about Trump’s claims of theft, said he has put rigorous “financial controls” in place.)</p><p dir="ltr">As a Cabinet secretary, Carson would likely lose his job if he were to slight Trump in a way that offends his vanity. That’s happened before—just ask the former Secretary of State <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/why-was-rex-tillerson-fired/580009/?utm_source=feed">Rex Tillerson</a>. However, in his remarks today, Carson separated himself from his boss in some fundamental respects. Though he didn’t directly impugn Trump’s behavior, it seemed at times as if he were talking to the president himself.</p><p dir="ltr">Carson said that Americans need to “realize that we’re not each other’s enemies and that we have a job to do here.” That doesn’t sound much like Trump, who seems less focused on wooing political adversaries than forcing their unconditional surrender. Or their exile: Tweeting about <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/racism-campaign-strategy/593962/?utm_source=feed">the four freshman congresswomen of color</a> known as “the squad” earlier this month, Trump wrote, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”</p><p dir="ltr">I asked Carson whether Cummings is largely responsible for poverty in his district. “I’m not one who likes to sit around and point fingers at people,” he said. “I like to come up with real solutions.” Trump is someone who does point fingers. In a tweet last week, he wrote: “So sad that Elijah Cummings has been able to do so little for the people of Baltimore.” The final question came from a reporter who asked whether Trump’s remarks about Cummings were racist. Carson walked away silently, got into a waiting SUV, and drove off.</p><p>Afterward, I went into the church to talk some more with Evans. He was behind a desk, a copy of <em>The</em> <em>Baltimore Sun</em> spread in front of him. He bristled at Carson’s suggestion that the church was at fault. He said the institution is an altruistic force in a neighborhood that sorely lacks investment. It runs food and clothing drives, he said, along with programs to help people get high-school diplomas and wean them from drug dependence. “We’ve done everything we can in this church,” he said. “But some things have to have support from government, not just the congregation.”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedJulio Cortez / APBen Carson’s Appearance in Baltimore Didn’t Go as Planned2019-07-31T17:50:13-04:002019-07-31T18:21:36-04:00The housing secretary didn’t offer Trump the sort of full-throated defense that the president might have expected.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-595006<p dir="ltr">It was just after 8:30 p.m., and Boris Johnson was with a group of about 20 politicians and donors at a private dinner in central London. At the time—June 6, 2018—Britain was mired in what seemed like an unending Brexit deadlock, and Johnson, then the country’s foreign secretary, was unhappy with the way Prime Minister Theresa May was handling it.</p><p dir="ltr">Away from the public glare, among friends and allies, he let his real feelings spill out.</p><p dir="ltr">“Imagine Donald Trump doing Brexit,” Johnson said, according to an audio recording <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexspence/boris-johnson-trump-brexit-leaked-recording?utm_term=.jbjMj8Zw6&amp;bftwuk#.xqW7WJpX9">published by <em>BuzzFeed News</em></a> the following day. “He’d go in bloody hard. There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere.”</p><p dir="ltr">Implicit in Johnson’s assessment was a damning verdict on May’s cautious handling of the negotiations to take Britain out of the European Union. Yet a year on, having now unseated May as prime minister, Johnson’s comments may also have been crucial in cementing his place in the U.S. president’s mind as a brother-in-arms across the Atlantic. That in 2015, as London mayor, Johnson publicly criticized Trump as “out of his mind” and “unfit to hold the office of president of the United States” appears to have mattered little. To Trump, the leaked private praise is what has stuck—the surest path to Trump’s affection being arrant flattery. The American leader has more recently rewarded Johnson with rare praise for a British politician, calling him “tough” and “smart,” and the pair, in their first conversation since Johnson became prime minister, have extolled the possibilities of bolstering economic ties.</p><p dir="ltr">Despite the public love-in, though, serious practical differences remain between them—both philosophical and strategic, from how to deal with Iran and the strategic threat posed by China, to climate change, the future of NATO, and trade. Fundamentally, Britain’s national interest, as currently calculated in London, sits uneasily with much of Trump’s “America first” platform, pitting the two leaders against each other on core international strategy. Several current and former officials in London and Washington, most of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly about the two leaders and their interactions, pointed to this gulf as a looming issue. This tension, between personality and policy, may well define not just the “special relationship,” but Britain’s relations with much of the rest of the world, too.</p><p dir="ltr">In their first conversation as respective leaders—on Friday, 48 hours after Johnson’s appointment as prime minister—Trump and Johnson spoke about the “unparalleled opportunity” to boost economic ties between the two countries after Brexit, and how much they looked forward to seeing each other in Biarritz, France, for a summit of the G7 group of industrialized countries in late August. The discussion was the latest in a string of recent positive remarks from each toward the other. Trump, in particular, has paid Johnson what he deems the ultimate compliment: “They’re saying ‘Britain Trump.’ They call him ‘Britain Trump.’”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/two-crises-one-existential-dilemma-boris-johnson/594688/?utm_source=feed">Read: Boris Johnson’s two biggest problems are one and the same</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Some former White House officials told us that Trump has also praised Johnson in private, seeing him as someone with the fortitude to achieve the goal that eluded his predecessor: leaving the EU. In prior conversations with Johnson—before he became prime minister, Trump spoke with Johnson over the phone while on a state visit to London in June—Trump had come away impressed, these people said.</p><p dir="ltr">That stood in contrast to his relationship with May, which had soured to the point that Trump viewed Johnson as a decided improvement, said people familiar with his thinking. He made clear to his advisers he didn’t believe that May had what it took to lead Britain, and was particularly incensed over a dustup with May in 2017, after he <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-retweets-anti-islam-videos-from-far-right-u-k-political-group-1511970639">retweeted false videos</a> posted by a British far-right nationalist that appeared to show Muslim men carrying out acts of violence. When a spokesman for May criticized Trump for sharing the videos, the president privately raged against the prime minister, a former White House official said. “He said she was ‘weak,’ she didn’t know what she was doing, and she was leading the country into the ground,” this official said. “It was every possible insult and frustration.”</p><p dir="ltr">“President Trump and May are just different personalities,” said Clete Willems, a former senior White House trade official under Trump and now a partner at Akin Gump, a law firm. “President Trump sees Johnson as a kindred spirit, and that bodes well for their ability to work through problems.”</p><p dir="ltr">But if Trump’s almost three years in office have proved anything, it is that personal relationships count for little in raw, practical terms. French President Emmanuel Macron’s early romance with Trump—cemented over dinner at the Eiffel Tower—has become strained in the face of political differences, and Japan’s Shinzō Abe, who has maintained a good personal relationship with the U.S. president, has won few obvious concessions.</p><p dir="ltr">“Trump’s whole record of relationships is, ‘You’re my best friend, as long as you’re doing exactly what I want. And when you stop doing what I want, then I’m going to attack you,’” said William Reinsch, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. “It takes a lot of work to maintain a good relationship with Trump, because loyalty only runs one way.” Of Trump’s relationship with Johnson, Reinsch continued: “They’re buddies this week, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be buddies when they get around to negotiating a trade agreement. An awful lot of things can happen between now and then.”</p><p dir="ltr">And therein lies the difficulty—personal affinity will only take this relationship so far. On issues of policy, there are real differences between Washington and London.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/boris-johnson-sank-kim-darroch-donald-trump/593680/?utm_source=feed">Boris Johnson’s pivot: Goodbye EU, hello U.S</a>]</i>.</p><p dir="ltr">The U.K., for example, does not support the policy of maximum pressure on Iran and is keen to make the most of Chinese economic growth and cheap technology, much to the chagrin of the U.S. State Department. Even on trade policy, though Trump has been effusive about the possibility of an Anglo-American free-trade deal after Brexit, that is not wholly the U.S. president’s gift to offer—Congress holds the power to veto any agreement negotiated by the Trump administration that changes U.S. law, further complicating the personal dynamic and its practical impact.</p><p dir="ltr">What’s more, even negotiating a trade deal between the two nations would present enormous hurdles. Over a period of decades, Britain has embraced European standards that won’t be easy to shed, experts said. Should Johnson make concessions to Trump and allow pharmaceutical companies and agricultural interests more access to the British market, the new prime minister could jeopardize his political support at home. “Trying to negotiate a trade agreement between the U.S. and the United Kingdom means asking the United Kingdom to decide whether it wants its primary trading partner to be us, or Europe,” Reinsch said. “And they answered that question 20 years ago. We’re longtime allies and friends, but [the British] are really tied to the Continent.”</p><p dir="ltr">Still, the volatility of Johnson’s “do or die” pursuit of Brexit—the prime minister has pledged to take Britain out of the EU by October 31, whether or not it has a deal on the terms of its withdrawal—has opened up a new prospect: a political partnership between the two leaders, based on <em>shared</em> strategic goals as well as personal rapport, which could reshape the special relationship between the U.S. and Britain.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/boris-johnson-profile/594379/?utm_source=feed">Read: Boris Johnson meets his destiny</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Inside the British government machine, there has, until now, been a fierce reluctance to let the fallout from Brexit affect other core foreign-policy calculations, principally on Iran, where the U.K. has lined up with France and Germany in opposition to the United States. Senior officials in London still hope to quarantine Brexit from these wider strategic calculations of Britain’s place in the world. Yet faced with the growing likelihood of an acrimonious divorce from the EU on October 31, serving and former officials in Washington and London suggested a Johnson premiership could reshape British foreign policy and orient it more sharply toward the United States.</p><p dir="ltr">The grand geopolitical picture now emerging is of a United States more and more at odds with Europe—and a U.K. locked in a bitter dispute that could poison its relationship with the Continent for years. Faced with the diplomatic and economic fallout of a no-deal Brexit, Johnson may feel forced to pivot toward the U.S. on foreign-policy questions, including Iran but also Britain’s stance regarding China, to secure the economic and security benefits of a close relationship with Washington. There is a feeling in the U.K. that a major deepening of the relationship in this regard could be tempting for Trump, putting practical meat on the bones of what Trumpism actually entails in the world.</p><p>Even in this regard, though, there are complications. A former official involved in the Brexit campaign who has worked with Johnson and several members of his team said the group was not instinctively pro-Trump in its philosophical outlook, even if members admired some parts of his strategy. The same former official noted that the new foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, is a former international lawyer who believes in the rules-based order and felt comfortable with the May administration’s calculations on China and Britain’s involvement with Huawei, as well as the pro-European position on Iran.</p><p dir="ltr">Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s principal adviser, is openly in thrall to Silicon Valley, captured by Facebook’s early motto, “Move fast and break things.” Yet his praise for what he has called the “great strengths of the Anglo-American system” does not carry over to Washington or its politics and institutions. Cummings has written that China’s economy will likely “dwarf” the U.S.’s over the next two decades, and has described its leader, Xi Jinping, as “formidable” and “very different to Western leaders obsessed with the frivolous spin cycles of domestic politics.” Cummings has suggested that the West should avoid defeat by not trying to “win” its strategic competition with China.</p><p dir="ltr">Regardless of his views and those of his staff, Johnson, still in the early days of his premiership, appears to have a positive relationship with Trump. The president has cast allies aside before, though. Without something to offer, “America first” will apply to Britain, just as it has to Canada, France, Japan, and others.</p>Tom McTaguehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/tom-mctague/?utm_source=feedPeter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedHenry Nicholls / Reuters<em>Doris Borump</em>, by the artist STOT21stcplanB, displayed on a wall in East London.Inside Donald Trump and Boris Johnson’s Special Relationship2019-07-30T01:00:00-04:002019-07-30T07:36:52-04:00The two leaders have lavished praise on each other, but serious practical differences remain between them. How long will the honeymoon last?tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-594955<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">After President Donald Trump took office, I spent some time talking to people who had met with him privately in the White House, trying to get a sense of what he’s like when the cameras are off.</p><p dir="ltr">At the time, I was a reporter at <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>. One of my most surprising interviews was with Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland. The duo didn’t seem like they’d hit it off when they met in the White House in March 2017. Cummings, a Democrat, is the son of sharecroppers from South Carolina; Trump, a Republican, is the son of a rich real-estate developer in New York who once faced federal allegations that his company refused to rent apartments to black tenants. When the two of them sat down to talk about lowering prescription-drug prices that spring, the conversation took an unexpected turn: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/talking-to-trump-a-how-to-guide-1516303402">They fell into a candid give-and-take about race</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">During the 2016 campaign, Trump had painted black neighborhoods as hellscapes from which there was no way out. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in 2016, trying to court black voters. “What the hell do you have to lose?”</p><p dir="ltr">Sitting together in the Oval Office that day, Cummings was blunt. The 13-term congressman told the president that his words were “insulting” and that “most black people are doing pretty good.” Trump didn’t get defensive or angry. He listened quietly, taking it in, Cummings recalled. “Probably nobody has ever told you that,” Cummings told the president. “You’re right—nobody has ever told me that,” Trump replied.</p><p dir="ltr">They parted on good terms, agreeing to talk more. Soon enough, it all came undone. That summer, Trump would tell reporters that there were very fine people “on both sides” of the clash between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned deadly.</p><p dir="ltr">Around that time, Cummings was growing steadily disillusioned with the president. He didn’t believe that what he had told Trump earlier in the year had made any real impression. Phone calls between the two stopped. What had looked like a fledgling alliance between two men of different parties, backgrounds, and races—a rarity in this political era—collapsed. “Now that I watch his actions, I don’t think it made any difference,” Cummings told me after the president’s first year in office. “I thought it had an impact at the moment, but his actions have not shown that.”</p><p dir="ltr">This weekend, things took another ugly turn. Beginning yesterday and continuing today, Trump sent a series of tweets blaming Cummings for poverty in his district. Calling Maryland’s Seventh a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump wrote that “no human being would want to live there.” (Neither the White House nor Cummings’s office responded to my request for comment about the president’s tweets.)</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/press-tires-russiagate/594874/?utm_source=feed">Adam Serwer: The press has adopted Trump’s reality-show standards</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">One does not have to be much of a sleuth to figure out what’s behind these latest effusions. Minutes before the president sent the tweets, <em>Fox &amp; Friends</em> had aired a report showing trash-strewn streets and decaying buildings in the West Baltimore neighborhood that is part of Cummings’s district. But the real spark may have come Thursday, when the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Cummings, voted to subpoena emails and text messages flowing from White House officials on personal accounts outside government systems, a move that could prove embarrassing to the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Both have said through their attorney that they used personal accounts while working in the White House, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/politics/personal-emails-white-house-ivanka.html"><em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> reported</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">In his tweets, Trump wrote that Cummings “spends all of his time trying to hurt innocent people through ‘Oversight.’” He complained about money going into Cummings’s district and, without presenting any evidence that anything was amiss, asked how much had been “stolen.”</p><p dir="ltr">“Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!” Trump tweeted. Who, exactly, should launch such an investigation and what, precisely, should be investigated, Trump didn’t say. But it hardly matters. The message seemed like a brushback pitch aimed squarely at Cummings, a reminder that Trump, as the head of an executive branch that includes the Justice and Housing Departments, possesses a daunting arsenal of retaliatory powers against many of his opponents.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s attacks on Cummings quickly drew criticism that he was once again trafficking in racist stereotypes. What defines the black-majority district, in Trump’s characterization, is the poverty of West Baltimore. Ignored are landmarks such as the Inner Harbor and the acclaimed Johns Hopkins Hospital, <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-0728-trump-baltimore-20190727-k6ac4yvnpvcczlaexdfglifada-story.html">as <em>The</em> <em>Baltimore Sun</em> noted in an editorial published yesterday</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Unmentioned by Trump was the district’s median income of $61,000, a sum exceeding that of the nation as a whole. Cummings, the newspaper wrote, “has been a thorn in this president’s side, and Mr. Trump sees attacking African American members of Congress as good politics, as it both warms the cockles of the white supremacists who love him and causes so many of the thoughtful people who don’t to scream.”</p><p dir="ltr">Is this good politics, though? Trump can’t seem to decide. He oscillates between courting black voters and pushing them away, depending on the moment and his mood. Last week, Trump declared that Sweden has “let our African American community down in the United States” after the government refused to release the American rapper A$AP Rocky, who is being held in the country on assault charges. (In reply to the president’s tweet, Swedish officials have said they’re beholden to the quaint notion of rule of law.)</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/07/ap-rockys-trial-sweden-what-it-means/594847/?utm_source=feed">Read: Why Trump cares about A$AP Rocky’s Sweden arrest</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s claims that black joblessness has dropped on his watch obscure a more complicated reality. Yes, the unemployment rate has been falling, as it had been for years during Barack Obama’s presidency. But black unemployment is still double that of white unemployment, and the wage gap between the races is worsening, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. “The most that we could say [about falling black unemployment] is that he hasn’t done anything to reverse that trend—not that he’s been helpful,” Wilson told me.</p><p dir="ltr">The president’s efforts to make headway with black voters often end in self-sabotage. No issue in U.S. politics is more fraught than race, yet Trump roils these waters with a heedlessness that ignores centuries of history, and slavery’s long-tail economic and social effects on black Americans today. Just two weeks ago, Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” His approval rating among black voters dropped five percentage points in the days following those insults, <a href="https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/454574-trump-approval-rating-drops-among-minorities-after-go-back">a Hill-HarrisX poll</a> released last week showed.</p><p dir="ltr">Joel Benenson, a strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run and both of Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaigns, predicted that the president’s racist attacks will boost anti-Trump turnout in 2020, mobilizing a swath of the electorate repelled by his behavior. That’s what happened in the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats captured the House on the strength of unusually high turnout, he said. “What it does is energize all decent Americans who tend not to be sympathetic to Trump’s persistent, disgusting racist tweets and tirades,” Benenson told me.</p><p dir="ltr">After returning to the White House from a golf outing this afternoon, Trump called Cummings “racist” in a tweet. Don’t expect any sort of détente anytime soon. Still, there’s something sad about how this latest episode unfolded. Go back to that early meeting in the Oval Office, when Cummings hoped to change Trump’s thinking on race and, according to Cummings, Trump was attentive and willing to listen. Here was Cummings offering to cross party lines and partner with Trump on policy; there sat Trump giving him an audience.</p><p dir="ltr">What if Trump had internalized Cummings’s message that day? Would he have cultivated a more diverse mix of voters rather than betting everything on an aging white base? Instead of viewing Maryland’s Seventh District as one congressman’s burden, might he have seen it as a shared responsibility? Instead of showcasing poverty-stricken streets via Twitter, might he have invited Cummings to tour the district together and talk about solutions?</p><p dir="ltr">That’s not Trump.</p><p dir="ltr">The meeting ended, and vanity took hold. A month after that Oval Office meeting two years ago, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/us/politics/donald-trump-interview-new-york-times-transcript.html">Trump told <em>The New York Times</em></a> that Cummings had assured him, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country.”</p><p dir="ltr">What Cummings actually said is that Trump had that potential.</p><p dir="ltr">We’re seeing the reality play out today.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedJ. Scott Applewhite / APRepresentative Elijah Cummings of Maryland is the latest recipient of Twitter attacks from President Trump.What Elijah Cummings Once Told Trump in Private2019-07-28T18:46:16-04:002019-07-29T07:32:04-04:00Two years before calling the prominent black congressman “racist,” the president was briefly humbled by him.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-594583<p dir="ltr"><small><em>Updated at 9:15 a.m. ET on July 24, 2019. </em></small></p><p dir="ltr">Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, President Donald Trump was coy about whether he planned to watch Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress today. First, he said he wouldn’t tune in, before changing his mind in real time: “Maybe I’ll see a little bit of it.”</p><p dir="ltr">Let’s put an end to the suspense: The first hearing began at 8:30 a.m. ET, smack in the middle of what Trump’s schedulers call “Executive Time,” their code for the president watching <em>Fox &amp; Friends</em> and pushing out tweets from the White House residence. It’s a good bet he’ll be riveted to the TV all day—soaking in the coverage as he and his allies try to spin the hearing their way.</p><p dir="ltr">“It’s going to be a dud, or it’s going to be a Dumpster fire,” said a White House official, who, like others I interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk frankly. “It’s not going to be something in between.”</p><p dir="ltr">Inside the White House, officials don’t know quite what to expect when Mueller appears before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. Trump has been hard at work trying to undercut him and cast the spectacle as a meaningless exercise. A second White House official told me the hearings could fizzle into nothing more than a “book on tape” if Mueller limits himself to reading excerpts from <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/mueller-report-release-summaries-barr-trump/587182/?utm_source=feed">his 448-page report</a>. But this public confidence belies some underlying anxiety: The administration and outside allies are girding for potential fallout, aware that if Mueller unexpectedly veers into new territory, he could make impeachment more palatable to a Democratic leadership that has resisted it thus far.</p><p dir="ltr">The Republican National Committee planned to set up a “war room” to monitor the back-and-forth exchanges between Mueller and the five dozen lawmakers he’s facing in both hearings, a committee staff member told me. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is one of a series of surrogates putting out statements and commentary as the hearings play out, with Republican aides using social media to amplify a pro-Trump message and booking sympathetic allies for TV and radio appearances, the staff member said. Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s main outside attorneys who defended him in the Russia investigation, planned to watch the testimony unfold live. “We’ll respond as appropriate,” Sekulow told me. But “I don’t expect any new revelations. [Mueller in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/robert-muellers-statement-russia-investigation-full-text/590458/?utm_source=feed">a public statement in May</a>] said his testimony is his report, and his report is his testimony. I don’t think he’ll go beyond that.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/mueller-testimony-impeachment-democrats/594562/?utm_source=feed">Read: Can Mueller persuade America to impeach?</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Yet Democrats seem largely unfazed, believing that televised hearings are a surefire way to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/mueller-testimony-impeachment-democrats/594562/?utm_source=feed">galvanize public opinion</a>. In their push to bring the Mueller report to life, as some Democrats have put it, it’s easy to imagine lawmakers asking some version of this question: “Mr. Mueller, did President Trump engage in behavior that rises to the level of criminal conduct, and is it your view that he can be properly held accountable only through impeachment proceedings?”</p><p dir="ltr">The White House is betting that Mueller would sidestep such a query, sticking to the Delphic formulation that he used in his rare public appearance in May, when he said, “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Yet if Mueller’s answer edges even a little bit close to “Yes” on both questions, it would mean trouble for Trump, reinvigorating the debate in Congress over the president’s fate and putting more pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to accommodate the faction of her caucus that wants him ousted. As it is, few people seem to have actually read the Mueller report, upping the chances that Mueller will be presenting brand-new information to at least some Americans watching. A poll taken for CNN in late April, about a week after the report was released, showed that 75 percent of respondents hadn’t read any of it, and only 3 percent had read the entire thing.</p><p dir="ltr">One message that Trump’s allies promoted in advance is that Democrats are wasting time and taxpayer money by trotting out the former special counsel. “There’s no apple left, but Democrats are still trying to get bites at it,” Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">It’s futile to look for consistency in Trump’s portrayal of the Mueller report, because a rich contradiction lies at the heart of his approach. When he believes something is exculpatory, he casts it as hard fact. Anything else, he dismisses as the work of a vengeful prosecutor. Ahead of Mueller’s testimony, Trump clearly felt threatened by what might come next and has been lashing out. The president woke up this morning focused on the hearings. In a series of early-morning tweets, he complained that Mueller shouldn’t be allowed to testify alongside one of his deputies, Aaron Zebley. “It was NEVER agreed that Robert Mueller could use one of his many Democrat Never Trumper lawyers to sit next to him and help him with his answer,” <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1153984090712018950">Trump tweeted</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">And the president this week has repeatedly accused Mueller of bias. He’s <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1154003030267899905">alleged</a> that he <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mueller-report-trump-fbi-director-claim-2019-5">turned down Mueller</a> for the job of FBI director, which became vacant after he fired James Comey. And in Oval Office comments on Monday, he revived his accusation that Mueller was still stewing over a “business relationship” that went sour, an apparent reference to Mueller’s attempt eight years ago to get his membership fee refunded from Trump National Golf Club in Northern Virginia. “He’s got big conflicts with me,” Trump said.</p><p dir="ltr">At times, though, Trump seems to forget whether he’s supposed to bash Mueller or elevate him. After Mueller closed the Russia investigation without bringing criminal charges against the president, Trump said that the special counsel acted honorably. In May, Trump referred to the Mueller report as an authoritative account on par with “the Bible.” In a pair of hearings that could last much of the day, it wouldn’t be at all surprising for Trump to toggle between messages, depending on how Mueller answers each question.</p><p dir="ltr">It’s likely Trump will be watching how his allies in the House Republican caucus approach the hearing too. If Democrats are still taking bites out of the apple, peckish Republicans might nibble on what’s left. The second White House aide voiced hope that Republican lawmakers will use the hearings to press Mueller on the origins of the probe. Trump and his associates on Capitol Hill have long argued that the investigation began in 2016 as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/trump-allies-want-barr-investigate-mueller-inquiry/587800/?utm_source=feed">an illegal attempt to spy on Trump’s campaign</a>, though given that Mueller wasn’t appointed until May 2017, he may be reluctant to touch that particular topic.</p><p dir="ltr">From Trump’s standpoint, there’s one outcome that would be indisputably positive: The hearing turns out to be “a dud” that does nothing to turbocharge impeachment talk. Ironically, for that to happen, Trump needs to have been wrong about Mueller this whole time. He needs to have been wrong about Mueller acting like a rogue prosecutor carrying out a “witch hunt,” or an aggrieved golfer upset about membership dues, or a spiteful job applicant taking retaliatory shots at the president who spurned him. He needs Mueller to use his televised platform today to give measured and judicious answers befitting a longtime public servant. Indeed, Trump must hope that Mueller is the man he genuinely seems to be, as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/mueller-barr-and-their-pre-trump-friendship/588151/?utm_source=feed">friends and colleagues describe him</a>—not the caricature the president created and lampooned for political advantage.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedBrendan Smialowski / GettyThe White House Is Preparing for a ‘Dud’ or a ‘Dumpster Fire’2019-07-24T04:30:00-04:002019-07-24T09:35:22-04:00The administration is girding for potential fallout from Robert Mueller’s testimony, but like the rest of the country, officials don’t know exactly what to expect.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-594268<p>GREENVILLE, N.C.—Before the rally began, I wanted to know why they’d come.</p><p>In the heavy, humid hours, I walked up and down the line winding through a parking lot at East Carolina University to interview some two dozen people who wanted to see the president. Many didn’t make it inside. About 90 minutes before Donald Trump took the stage, police announced that the 8,000-person basketball arena was full and those still waiting would have to watch on an oversize TV monitor set up outside. Rather than head home, they stuck around for a tailgate party of sorts.</p><p>Some cracked open beers and lit cigars, sitting on folding chairs in front of the TV. People walked by in shirts that read <span class="smallcaps">In Trump We Trust</span> and <span class="smallcaps">Fuck Off, We’re Full</span>. Earlier, in the 100-degree heat, a four-member family band called the Terry Train entertained the crowd with a song mocking CNN. <em>Lying Wolf Blitzer and Lying John King. Don Lemon lies about everything … Erin Burnett, can you hear us yet? We’ll give you a story you can never forget.</em> It built to this refrain: <em>CNN sucks!</em></p><p dir="ltr">The event itself would soon turn into one of the darkest of Trump’s political career, with the president road testing a new enemy and eliciting from the crowd a fresh, frenzied three-word chant: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/send-her-back/594253/?utm_source=feed">“Send her back!”</a> But even before he appeared, this week in American politics had been a convulsive one. Trump tweeted racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color—including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the target of “Send her back!”—and the House, in turn, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/pelosi-squad-and-fight-over-trump-house-floor/594169/?utm_source=feed">rebuked the president</a> in a party-line vote.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s coarsening of political debate always leads to the same question: Did he go so far as to alienate even some of his own supporters? Did his blowing past the boundaries of acceptable discourse render him unelectable? That his base showed up in force last night, parroting his attacks on the congresswomen, once again showed that, for these voters, the answer is no. (Whether the suburban white women and independent voters who were part of his 2016 coalition feel the same is far from certain.)</p><p dir="ltr">Talking with the rallygoers, I couldn’t find one who faulted Trump for demonizing the freshman representatives, all four of whom are American citizens, calling on them to leave the United States and return to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few conceded that Trump occasionally fires off an inappropriate tweet, but said his accomplishments in office overshadow any offense. If anything, they said, his language springs from an authenticity they find refreshing. None of the people I spoke with considered his comments about the congresswomen racist.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/send-her-back/594253/?utm_source=feed">Read: ‘Send her back!’: The bigoted rallying cry of Trump 2020</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">“He’s not always the best at how he handles his emotions,” said Christian Carraway, 32, of Greenville, sitting on a folding chair outside the arena and waiting for Trump to appear. “He’s a very emotional guy. Passionate. But I like his policies and I think he has good intentions.” </p><p dir="ltr">All seemed to accept Trump’s slight reformulation of his original tweets. Trump’s initial messages had a hard edge: “These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.” Amid an uproar over his comments, Trump reworked the argument a bit: He now says that if the congresswomen want to leave, they’re welcome to do so, but they’re also free to stay. </p><p dir="ltr">It doesn’t appear that Trump’s supporters inside the arena, with their “Send her back!” chants, believed his message needed any softening. One thing was certain: When Trump stepped behind the podium, he looked out at an audience that was fertile ground for continued attacks on the four representatives—a crowd that believed the congresswomen may have deserved what they got. </p><p dir="ltr">Here, a few snapshots.</p><hr><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/07/071719_trump_greenville_rcj_185_1/9177afb5c.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Rachel JEssen</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Cheryl Stacy, 64, a retired nurse from Beaufort County, North Carolina</strong></em></p><p dir="ltr">“Everything he says is how I feel,” Stacy said. “I feel like, ‘Hey, man. You hate the country, you don’t like it, you trash the country—get out of the country! Move on!’”</p><p dir="ltr">On the House resolution that labeled Trump’s attacks on the congresswomen racist: “I don’t think they were racist at all. I know this president. I’ve been to his inauguration, been to his other rallies. Everything he says I agree with,” she said. “He’s speaking for me. He may be a little rough around the edges, but he’s not a politician. I’m a little rough around the edges in this interview, but I love this country.”</p><p dir="ltr">As for Trump’s tweets: “Everybody’s tweeting crazy things. Everybody is! Why point the finger at him?”</p><hr><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/07/071719_trump_greenville_rcj_269/7029b9a12.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Rachel Jessen</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><strong><em>Lee Chambers, 69, a real-estate agent and retired Air Force officer from Gainesville, Virginia</em></strong></p><p dir="ltr">“He didn’t say anything in his comments about race,” Chambers said. The representatives “happen to have views that are toxic, especially for members of Congress. They lie to advance their cause.”</p><p dir="ltr">Chambers was one of the few African Americans I saw in the crowd outside the arena. Asked whether he faces criticism for backing Trump, he laughed: “The only time I’ve gotten heat is at my family reunion.” He mentioned his red pro-Trump hat: “I’ve got five different hats. I just bought another one. I’m excited. I want people to know that there are people who support this president.” At his family reunions, “they told me don’t wear my Trump gear again. And I told them, ‘It’s a free country.’”</p><hr><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="990" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/07/Screen_Shot_2019_07_18_at_9.08.44_AM/065b2713f.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Rachel Jessen</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Randall Terry, 60, an anti-abortion activist from Memphis and the father of the Terry Train band members </strong></em></p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s comments about the congresswomen were “not even remotely racist,” Terry said. “It was only about the systems of government from where they’re from. These wenches. These disrespectful wenches criticize our country incessantly.</p><p dir="ltr">“Well, Ilhan Omar, go back to some Middle Eastern country where you’d be afraid to live under Sharia law! I’m of Italian descent. I don’t care what color the skin is … You don’t like America? Go back to where your ancestors are from and then try to make that country better.”</p><hr><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/07/071719_trump_greenville_rcj_583_1/4d91018d4.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Rachel Jessen</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Matthew Ritchie, 18, an incoming student at Texas A&amp;M University from Kernersville, North Carolina</strong></em></p><p dir="ltr">“I want to be here. I feel unity here. Everyone is like-minded here and celebrating the U.S. and our president,” Ritchie said. Trump “has done a good job so far. He’s been able to get more jobs back into the U.S. They’re building more cars here; the economy is growing.”</p><p dir="ltr">Could he imagine casting his first-ever vote for someone other than Trump? “If there were grounds for impeachment, I would look at those. But it would have to be very credible for me to change my mind.” As for Trump’s tweets about the congresswomen, “I don’t believe it was racist. He’s just making a point and speaking his mind. That’s important. There aren’t enough people who say that nowadays. Everyone is politically correct. You can’t get out what you want to say. I like that in a person. He speaks from the heart and speaks his mind.”</p><hr><p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Darlene Schadt, 69, a real-estate agent from High Point, North Carolina</strong></em></p><p dir="ltr">“One thing ‘the squad’ keeps saying is that he’s not legitimate,” Schadt said. “How ridiculous.” What Trump said about the congresswomen “was okay with me, because I felt the same way. You can be critical, but you can’t be vile and constantly ugly. Every way of life that we Americans like, they disagree with. They have that kind of venom going on.” Trump’s critics “throw shit at him every day, all day long. It makes us want to support him more.”</p><hr><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="1008" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/07/071719_trump_greenville_rcj_136/d9239f6ed.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Rachel Jessen</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Nancy Chiu, 53, a nurse, and her son Chen Chiu, 23, who works for a software company, both from Raleigh, North Carolina</strong></em></p><p dir="ltr">Chen Chiu said his mother, a naturalized citizen, “didn’t like where she was at in Cuba. There was no food. You had no freedom of speech. So she left. She came to the U.S. seeking a better home. She left family and friends. There is so much freedom here.”</p><p dir="ltr">Nancy Chiu said she plans to vote for Trump in 2020, dismissing criticism of him as “fake news.” “He’s following his agenda,” she said. “Nothing is perfect.”</p><p dir="ltr">Asked about Trump’s criticism of the congresswomen, her son said: “They are Americans. My mom was Cuban. She didn’t like how things were going there. She saw the opportunity and she left.”</p><hr><p dir="ltr"><em><strong>Gary Welker, 47, owner of a tattoo business and a lawn-care service from Hubert, North Carolina</strong></em></p><p dir="ltr">“You ask what appeals to me [about Trump]. The easiest way to say it: everything. Everything about him,” Welker said. “Everything about what he’s doing for this country.” Referencing the separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and motioning to a man standing nearby in line, he said: “If I had my child with me right now, and I would punch that young man in the mouth, I would go to jail and my child would be taken away. So if they come into this country illegally, they should be taken from their children. Coming here illegally is wrong. There are ports of entry and legal ways to do it. Do it the right way.”</p><p dir="ltr">Are the congresswomen Trump attacked Americans who belong in this country? “I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you answer that?”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedRachel Jessen‘It Makes Us Want to Support Him More’2019-07-18T13:15:42-04:002019-07-18T14:07:46-04:00Amid a convulsive week in American politics, at one of the darkest rallies Donald Trump has ever held, his base showed up in force to tell the president he’s done nothing wrong.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-594013<p>A day after President Donald Trump tweeted that four women of color in Congress should go back to the countries “from which they came,” a reporter asked him today if he’s troubled at all that his comments have been called racist, and that white nationalists have found “common cause” with him “on that point.”</p><p dir="ltr">“It doesn’t concern me,” the president replied, “because many people agree with me.”</p><p dir="ltr">It’s easy to read Trump’s tweets or watch his public appearances and see someone who’s filled with grievance and lashing out mindlessly in all directions. But Trump’s actions over the past five days fit within the strategy he has mapped out for capturing a second term: mobilizing his conservative base by any means necessary, using the tools and trappings available only to a sitting president. And perhaps no comment from Trump sums up his approach quite so well as his justification that “many people” share his views. Who are these people? Trump doesn’t say. But it seems clear he believes it’s the people who voted him into office.</p><p dir="ltr">The consistent message coming from Trump is that his core voters are under siege. Immigrants are crowding them out, he argues. Courts are messing with the census and preventing an accurate count of who is living in the U.S. legally and who is not. Big tech companies are suppressing their voices, he says. By casting himself as the champion of older white voters, he is promising to battle the broader demographic trends and technological forces that might discomfit his base.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/racism-campaign-strategy/593962/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump goes all in on racism</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">A verity of American politics is that the game is about addition. A successful candidate preserves his core support and builds out. Yet more than a year before the 2020 election, Trump has shown no appetite for enlarging his coalition. He seems content to win or lose with the ones who got him this far. “The president has, since the day he was elected, focused his attention on stimulating and energizing the people who were already for him—often at the expense of people who are not,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told me. “He’s made no effort at all to expand his base of support.”</p><p dir="ltr">In the latest display of base-centric politics, Trump cast the Democratic congresswomen as malcontents who aren’t truly American. Speaking to reporters outside the White House today, following even more tweets about the lawmakers, Trump doubled down on his criticism, singling out Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and calling the country of her birth, Somalia, “a failed state.”</p><p dir="ltr">Of the broader group, he said: “These are people who hate our country. They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”</p><p dir="ltr">Dissent, as expressed repeatedly by the congresswomen, is a rich tradition in a country that has enshrined free speech as a constitutional right. Trump is making an argument here that it is un-American. He can’t evict the lawmakers, but he can deport those who are living here illegally and, in recent days, he’s escalated threats to do just that.</p><p dir="ltr">During a Rose Garden address on Thursday, Trump brushed aside a court defeat that prevented his administration from using the census to find out who’s living in the country illegally. Instead, he said, he would order federal agencies to give him the answer using data they’ve already compiled. He also warned that federal agents would be rounding up undocumented immigrants in large-scale raids set to begin over the weekend.</p><p dir="ltr">Just before that address, Trump presided over what the White House had billed as a “social-media summit” but had more the flavor of a campaign rally in the East Room. Missing were representatives from the major tech titans Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Present were a slew of conspiracy theorists and internet agitators whose memes and messages have sought to marginalize Trump’s political opponents. “The crap you think of is unbelievable,” the president told the crowd, admiringly.</p><p dir="ltr">In a speech that meandered every which way, Trump suggested that Twitter was reducing his number of followers out of spite; boasted of the attention paid to his tweet announcing that the U.S. would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; ridiculed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance on his old show <em>The</em> <em>Celebrity Apprentice</em>; claimed that his hair is authentic; and argued that his chief 2020 foe, former Vice President Joe Biden, can’t draw large crowds to his campaign events.</p><p dir="ltr">To the extent that there was a coherent thread through his remarks, it was that he and his supporters are victimized by elites in the press and the tech industry who don’t like their politics. “But with amazing creativity and determination, you’re bypassing the corrupt establishment—and it is corrupt—and you’re bypassing the very, very corrupt media,” he told his audience.</p><p dir="ltr">In practical terms, nothing Trump did or said over the past few days changed much of anything.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s social-media summit seems to have been nothing more than a chance for him and his internet army to vent.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trump-welcomes-foreign-interference-2020-campaign/591589/?utm_source=feed">Read: It’s 2016 all over again</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Regarding his Plan B for the census, his explanation made little sense: If he could acquire citizenship data “in greater detail and more accurately” from federal agencies—as he said in the Rose Garden on Thursday—why did he fight in court to get a citizenship question added to the census in the first place?</p><p dir="ltr">His attacks on the congresswomen—Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—are uniting a Democratic caucus that has been at odds over policy and whether to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has traded criticism with the congresswomen, immediately came to their defense, tweeting that Trump’s comments demonstrate that his real goal is “making America white again.”</p><p dir="ltr">And there is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/as-immigrant-families-wait-in-dread-no-sign-of-large-scale-enforcement-raids/2019/07/14/ff29326a-a644-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html">no evidence</a> that yesterday was the starter gun for the massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids he promised. It seems likely that Trump’s purpose wasn’t to <em>actually</em> deport more people so much as to telegraph to his base that he <em>wanted</em> to deport more people. The intention might be enough. “For him, he wants to say, ‘Look, I’m out in front on this. I told you I would do this, I’m doing it. Here we go.’ From a political perspective that’s certainly the case,” says Erin Corcoran, the executive director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and an expert on immigration law.</p><p dir="ltr">Taken together, Trump’s actions suggest he’s confident he can get reelected through his base alone. Past presidents have sought to expand their core support ahead of reelection, with some success. Republican George W. Bush, for example, increased his support among Latinos by about 10 points between 2000 and 2004, leading to a more comfortable margin of victory the second time around.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s strategy amounts to a gamble. He won 46 percent of the popular vote in the 2016 election (compared with 48 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton) and his job-approval rating, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/203207/trump-job-approval-weekly.aspx">according to Gallup</a>, has never exceeded that number over the two and a half years he’s been in office. Trump won last time by narrowly flipping three states that had reliably delivered for Democrats for the past two decades: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. “He managed to draw an inside straight in 2016, and won three critical Rust Belt states,” Ayres said. “If that’s the strategy for 2020, the question is whether you can draw an inside straight two hands in a row.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump must hope that a diversifying America is no match for an energized base that both delights in his attacks on political opponents and shares his vision for the more racially and ideologically homogeneous country they knew in their youth. He hasn’t changed much in the past three years, and he’s betting the electorate hasn’t changed much, either.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedAlex Brandon / APAll About That Base2019-07-15T15:35:02-04:002019-07-16T13:20:42-04:00With his attacks on Democratic women of color and his threats to undocumented immigrants, President Trump has only one small audience in mind.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-593851<p>It’s a moment in Donald Trump’s presidency that has become all too familiar: another round of bloodletting.<br><br>
Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta had gambled that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/alex-acosta-blames-victims-reticence-epstein-case/593713/?utm_source=feed">his news conference</a> on Wednesday would appease an audience of one: Trump. But Acosta’s defense of how, as U.S. attorney in Florida, he handled a sex-crimes case against the financier Jeffrey Epstein failed to dampen accusations that <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html">he had gone easy on a rich and powerful predator</a>. Amid mounting calls for his resignation, Acosta <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/a-taxonomy-of-trumps-firings/593860/?utm_source=feed">announced yesterday</a> he would step down. His departure gratifies critics who believed he deserved a comeuppance. Yet political advisers fear the broader tumult inside the administration could also roil Trump’s reelection bid, feeding long-standing criticism that he hasn’t properly vetted his appointees, nor met his promise to recruit the best people. And Acosta’s fall creates a fresh vacancy in an administration that has already seen record-setting turnover.</p><p>Relying on a string of officials holding jobs on a temporary basis, Trump is sitting atop a hollowed-out administration that is lacking in the permanent leadership needed to manage escalating foreign and domestic crises, good-government experts told me. Signs suggest the churn isn’t about to stop. Trump has been calling friends and advisers lately about <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/john-boltons-long-game/593134/?utm_source=feed">National Security Adviser John Bolton</a>, looking for their impressions of his performance and asking whether he needs to go, according to people who have been briefed on the calls and who, like others I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. Meanwhile, <em>Axios</em>, among other news outlets, reported yesterday that Trump has told confidants he <a href="https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-remove-dan-coats-director-of-national-intelligence-2ba4275d-7624-4f4b-9026-ee0d0606ce32.html?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=twsocialshare&amp;utm_campaign=organic">wants to replace Dan Coats</a>, the director of national intelligence, with whom the president has had an uneasy relationship.</p><p>Acosta was the president’s first and only labor secretary. But should Trump oust Bolton—whose hawkish approach to foreign policy clashes at times with his own reluctance to use military force—he’ll have cycled through four national security advisers in less than three years. Predicting anyone’s future in the Trump White House is chancy, in part because Trump’s public demonstrations of support don’t mean much. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he felt “very badly” for Acosta and that the plea deal he struck with Epstein in 2008 shouldn’t mar his reputation. (Another illuminating example: A year ago, then–Chief of Staff John Kelly walked into a senior-staff meeting and said that Trump had assured him <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kelly-has-told-white-house-staff-trump-asked-him-to-stay-in-post-through-2020-1533053182">he’d be sticking around</a> through the 2020 election. Five months later, Kelly was gone.) As for Bolton, a person familiar with the matter said his job is secure and that Trump wants him to appear more frequently on television as a surrogate, laying out the administration’s foreign-policy positions.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link">Read: <i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/alex-acosta-blames-victims-reticence-epstein-case/593713/?utm_source=feed">Instead of an apology, Acosta offers Epstein’s victims implicit blame</a>]</i></p><p>Still, the upheaval worries both Trump partisans and good-government groups, albeit for different reasons. Trump’s campaign advisers believe that high-profile firings reinforce perceptions that the administration is in upheaval, just as the 2020 election gets into full swing. And when it comes to Bolton in particular, they worry that his removal would touch off a purge within the National Security Council that Trump can’t afford. “The guys who talk to Trump are looking for <em>less, less</em> chaos in the building,” a person close to the president told me.<br><br>
Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, is no fan of Trump. But he told me he’d like to see Bolton stay put. “He has a different perspective from other folks in the White House, but he’s a very thoughtful, very experienced person,” Romney said. “While I certainly disagree with him from time to time, having a thinker who’s willing to express himself is a good thing.” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida offered similar sentiments in a prepared statement yesterday: There is “no one better” to serve as national security adviser than Bolton.</p><p>At the halfway point in Trump’s term, many federal departments are leaderless or headed by people serving in an acting capacity, which is tantamount to a substitute teacher trying to run a classroom, said Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group focused on the workings of the federal government. “Leaders matter, and permanent leaders matter a lot,” Stier told me. “This is an unprecedented level of temporary leadership across the entire federal government, but concentrated in places that are acutely worrisome.” He cited key vacancies at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, “where there are issues at stake right now of high consequence.</p><p>“It’s not as if there’s no one there,” Stier added, “but you have folks serving in acting roles across these critical functions who are restricted in their ability to function as well as they were meant to.”<br><br>
Replacing Acosta, for now, is Patrick Pizzella, the deputy secretary who was tapped for the top job yesterday on an acting basis. As Stier mentioned, other Cabinet members working in a similar acting capacity include Defense Secretary Mark Esper (at a time when tensions are escalating with Iran), and the Homeland Security chief Kevin McAleenan (amid reports that migrants, including many children, are being detained in squalid conditions at the southern border). Inside the White House, Mick Mulvaney <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/04/mick-mulvaney-white-house-2020-and-mueller/588022/?utm_source=feed">remains the acting chief of staff</a> seven months after he was named to the position. He also never relinquished his title as director of the Office of Management and Budget, which he has nominally led since 2017. Russell Vought is heading that shop on an acting basis, at a moment when the government <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/us/politics/debt-ceiling.html">is close</a> to running out of money.</p><p>A recurrent management problem in the administration is Trump’s inability to find qualified people for top jobs and to stick with them once they’re installed. His habit is to restlessly sample people of varied backgrounds. Since taking office, he has surrounded himself with military generals and civilians, campaign loyalists and political foes, conservative ideologues and apolitical technocrats, Fox News celebrities and complete unknowns. Many have washed out, and the only ones he seems to fundamentally trust are family members, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-book.html">even as he’s mused</a> about sending his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump back home to New York. Stier’s group found that just 57 percent of Trump’s nominees have been confirmed by the Senate. At a comparable period in Barack Obama’s presidency, the figure was 75 percent. Trump has withdrawn more than twice as many nominees as Obama had at this point in their respective presidencies.<br><br>
That’s translated to a parade of people coming and going. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has studied “serial” turnover in Trump White House jobs, what she casts as a “common phenomenon.” When Stephanie Grisham replaced Sarah Sanders as Trump’s press secretary last month, she also took on the role of communications director—the fifth person to hold that job. (Anyone in a job that involves getting Trump good press is in a precarious spot, his concern about media coverage being bottomless.) Apart from the volatility atop the NSC, five different people have served as deputy national security adviser, Tenpas noted—a position crucial to coordinating foreign-policy decisions across the government.<br><br>
Acosta had hoped to hang on, counting on Trump’s loyalty. Trump praised his performance yesterday as the two spoke with the press outside the White House. “He’s Hispanic, which I so admire,” Trump said, “because maybe it was a little tougher for him, and maybe not.” But Acosta had other run-ins with the White House. Some officials had attended meetings with his deputies over the past year and complained that he wasn’t moving quickly enough to carry out Trump’s deregulatory agenda within the Labor Department, former administration officials told me. Asked for comment, Mulvaney said in a prepared statement: “I push all of the Cabinet secretaries on the deregulatory agenda, as it is a top priority of the president. That in no way should be interpreted as displeasure with any Cabinet member, including Secretary Acosta.”</p><p>With <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-indictment-hes-out-luck/593512/?utm_source=feed">abuse, money, and power</a> at the heart of the Epstein case, it’s no surprise that Acosta’s resignation is getting enormous coverage. But the drama surrounding high-profile administration departures obscures what’s happening at lower levels of the government, whose power over people’s lives is no less profound. Virtually no attention was paid to an announcement in May that a lingering hole inside Acosta’s department would remain unfilled: Scott Mugno, a former FedEx official, pulled his name from consideration to be the permanent head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA doesn’t deal in trivialities; its mandate is workplace safety: life and death. Mugno had been waiting more than a year to be confirmed by the Senate and wanted to move on, <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/trump-labor-safety-nominee-withdraws-on-cusp-of-confirmation"><em>Bloomberg Law</em> reported</a>. What that means is that OSHA isn’t likely to have a permanent chief for the entirety of the president’s four-year term. That’s never happened since OSHA opened, in 1971.<br><br>
“There’s really no one in charge there. With the circumstances at the Labor Department being what they are, I don’t know anyone at this point who would be willing to take that job,” John Martin, who practices workplace-safety law at Ogletree Deakins, a labor-and-employment law firm, said in an interview. “If they’re going to offer the position to someone, I would assume the person would want to know at the very least who my boss is going to be—who’s going to be the Secretary of Labor for the duration.” That question may be unanswerable. Trump’s track record is clear. Whoever gets the job probably shouldn’t expect to keep it.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedAndrew Harnik / APIt’s a Precarious Time for Any Official in Trump’s Orbit2019-07-13T05:00:00-04:002019-07-13T05:00:39-04:00Alexander Acosta’s exit gratifies those who wanted him gone for his role in the Epstein plea deal. But the president’s advisers fear how more turnover reflects broader turmoil within the administration.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-593668<p dir="ltr">No one who has to deal with President Donald Trump can long survive his wrath once he feels he’s been wronged. Rex Tillerson might still be secretary of state had press reports not revealed in October 2017 that he had privately called Trump a “moron.” Five months later, Tillerson was gone (having not jumped at Trump’s proposal that they square off in an <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41570266">IQ test</a>). Jeff Sessions made the fatal error of recusing himself from the Russia investigation. After more than a year of emasculating the attorney general on Twitter, Trump booted Sessions right after the midterm elections.</p><p dir="ltr">Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the United States, isn’t sticking around long enough to endure the humiliations Trump is only too happy to inflict. Coming off the leak of private cables he’d sent back to London describing Trump as someone who “radiates insecurity” and will never “look competent,” Darroch announced his resignation this morning. Darroch’s critique was precisely the variety Trump can’t stomach. It was personal and damning, desecrating the image Trump has painstakingly tried to construct.</p><p>For a day or so, Darroch looked like he might be able to weather the transatlantic crisis. Embassy officials were relieved to see supportive comments from British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who’s also a candidate to succeed Theresa May as prime minister. A Trump-administration official told me at the time of the leak that no efforts were under way to strip Darroch of his diplomatic credentials or insist that he return to London. Talks between British embassy officials and the White House continued even as Trump tweeted hostilities at Darroch. The president called him “the wacky ambassador” and “a very stupid guy.” Darroch was not “well liked,” Trump said, and “we will no longer deal with him.” All that was predictable; Trump won’t ignore a slight so long as it’s getting traction on cable news. “I think [Trump] believes if you turn the other cheek too far, you get it in the neck,” Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, told me recently. “His instincts are always going to be to fight back.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/message-trump-sent-forcing-out-kim-darroch/593617/?utm_source=feed">Read: The U.K. ambassador’s crime was stating the obvious</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Though embassy officials hoped that Darroch could persevere in the job, there were warning signs that all wouldn’t be so easily forgiven. The White House rescinded Darroch’s invitation to attend a dinner at the Treasury Department on Monday night in honor of the visiting emir of Qatar, said people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue. On his own, Darroch opted not to attend a meeting yesterday between British Trade Minister Liam Fox and Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a senior White House official.</p><p dir="ltr">Darroch was also under pressure back home. In a candidate debate last night, Boris Johnson, the favorite in the race for prime minister, would not commit to retaining Darroch in the post.</p><p>One of the people familiar with the matter told <em>The Atlantic</em> that both Johnson’s hesitation and Donald Trump’s attacks were among the reasons Darroch chose to step down. A senior government official from a European Union country, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told <em>The Atlantic</em>: “There was no way [Darroch] could have stayed once Trump reacted as he did. But whoever leaked the reports has struck a blow at a fundamental element of diplomacy.”</p><p>The mood inside the embassy was somber in the hours after Darroch’s resignation. Supportive phone calls came in from the United Kingdom’s diplomatic corps based in the United States, one of the people familiar with the matter said. “It’s incredibly sad,” this person said.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/britain-has-few-options-trump-attacks-its-ambassador/593545/?utm_source=feed">Read: Britain has no good options for its U.S. ambassador</a>]</i></p><p>So many tempests sweep through Washington, D.C., these days, it seems inevitable that this one will be quickly forgotten. The city is now consumed by the status of Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, who is facing criticism for his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal back when he served as a U.S. attorney. But in its own way, the Darroch dustup captures many of the ironies that underpin U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era. A diplomat’s job is to speak candidly to his own government—which is just what Darroch did. America’s foreign-policy establishment knows this to be true. In 2010, WikiLeaks dumped huge volumes of U.S. diplomatic cables that included unsparing assessments of overseas allies. In some of the secret documents, officials at the U.S. embassy in Germany described German officials as <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/embarrassing-revelations-abound-in-leaked-us-cables/">shallow</a> in their thinking and not especially good at their jobs.</p><p dir="ltr">Then-President Barack Obama <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/wikileaks-barack-obama-public-comment">defended</a> his diplomatic corps, saying in one speech that his administration wanted relationships with other countries that depend “on trust” and “on candor.”</p><p dir="ltr">And once again, Trump’s invective is directed at America’s democratic allies, as opposed to authoritarian adversaries. He said he won’t deal with Darroch, but he will deal with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator, who has also insulted Trump, but who has made amends through a series of fawning letters that Trump has described as “beautiful.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/boris-johnson-sank-kim-darroch-donald-trump/593680/?utm_source=feed">Read: Boris Johnson’s pivot: Goodbye EU, hello U.S.</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The episode also raises anew a long-standing issue of credibility when it comes to Trump: Can we believe what he says? On Monday, he tweeted that the ambassador is not “well thought of within the U.S.” Is that really the case? Because if it is, it didn’t stop Trump-administration officials from attending many social functions the British embassy hosted during the past two and a half years.</p><p>Last month, I was in the audience in London when Trump and May held a joint news conference. Asked about her handling of Brexit, Trump said: “I believe the prime minister has brought it to a very good point where something will take place in the not-too-distant future. I think she’s done a very good job.”</p><p>Here’s what he said about May in a tweet on Monday: “I have been very critical about the way the U.K. and Prime Minister Theresa May handled Brexit. What a mess she and her representatives have created.”</p><p>Both statements can’t be true. Darroch spoke what he saw as the truth, and for doing so, he’s out. Trump said what was most expedient or useful to him in the moment. He’s running for reelection.</p><p><em><small>Tom McTague contributed to this article.</small></em></p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersBritain's ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch (<i>center</i>), listens as President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May hold a joint news conference at the White House on January 27, 2017.Trump’s Tweets Take Down Another Career2019-07-10T14:04:48-04:002019-07-10T15:05:59-04:00The British ambassador’s critique was precisely the variety Donald Trump can’t stomach.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-593359<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">At 6:40 last night, President Donald Trump stood at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, flanked by a pair of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, guns pointed toward the crowd.</p><p dir="ltr">His speech—the first July 4 address given by a president on the National Mall since Harry Truman in 1951—was unusual, by Trump standards. There was little in the way of self-congratulation; no insults were hurled at enemies. For roughly 45 minutes, the president celebrated the nation’s history and its military hardware. But the event had the unmistakable feel of a Trump rally all the same. Blue “Trump” banners were draped from fencing used to contain the crowds. Chants of “Four more years!” rose from his supporters. A group standing beside the Reflecting Pool shouted “Lock her up!” (Hillary Clinton isn’t running for anything, but three years after the last presidential election, she’s a villain Trump and many of his supporters can’t quit.)</p><p dir="ltr">The crowd was separated into two tiers: one closer to Trump, and everybody else, extending farther east, past the Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument.</p><p dir="ltr">Rob Sanderson has no particular affection for the president. But there he was in a patch blocked off for VIPs, perfectly positioned to see the president deliver his address. A buddy who works at the Interior Department had offered him the ticket, and Sanderson, 49, who lives outside Washington, D.C., thought, <em>Hey, why not—it’s part of history</em>. Getting in, he told me, “was pretty easy. I was surprised.”</p><p dir="ltr">Earlier in the day, a forlorn Ron Wheatbrook, his red Trump hat soaked with rain, sat on a bench staring at a chain-link fence, far from the stage where the president would speak. He couldn’t snag a ticket. He tried and failed to find one online. “I see people going in,” Wheatbrook, 58, who hauls steel for a living back home in Indiana, told me in an interview. “Who are these people, and where did they get their tickets? I’m a Trump supporter. I voted for Trump. And now I can’t get on the other side of that fence.”</p><p dir="ltr">A Mall celebration that is normally “come one, come all” was split into haves and have-nots, as the choicest spots to watch Trump’s speech were off-limits to anyone without a VIP ticket. Scoring one depended on who you were and whom you knew: Distribution was controlled by the White House, the Trump reelection campaign, and the Republican National Committee.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/trumps-july-4-takeover-washington-was-inevitable/593254/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump’s Fourth of July takeover was inevitable</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">When I stepped onto the Mall at the Smithsonian Metro stop yesterday afternoon, the first thing I saw was a National Park Service volunteer showing a map to a group of tourists. He pointed to the real estate nearest to the Lincoln Memorial, the backdrop for Trump’s address. “If you’re a major RNC donor, you go here,” he said, smiling. As I entered that VIP section from Constitution Avenue a few hours later with my press pass, I asked a young woman how she got her ticket. “I work at the White House,” she told me.</p><p dir="ltr">The Resistance was on the case, clustered farther east on the Mall, near the World War II Memorial. A mechanical statue of a speaking, flatulating Trump was the rallying point. Sitting on a toilet, phone in hand, the Trump statue would periodically blurt out a few familiar phrases: “You are fake news” … “I’m a very stable genius” … “No collusion!” Organizers had hoped to loft into the air the “Trump baby balloon”—a rotund Trump wearing a diaper—but told me they couldn’t get a permit for helium.</p><p dir="ltr">After singing with protesters, Roland Gutierrez, 56, headed home before Trump spoke. He said he was a Navy veteran who suffered from PTSD and told me the vibe from Trump supporters made him anxious. “A lot of hate,” he said. “I don’t like to be around hate. I’m not a hater. Every single person has value, even the ones wearing the MAGA hats.”</p><p dir="ltr">Selling MAGA hats for $20 apiece was John Lang, standing beneath a canopy of trees that partially shielded people from a steady rain. Lang had driven nine hours from Lexington, Kentucky, to come to the Mall. Seeing his hats, a few people gave him a sideways look, he told me, but nothing abusive. “We’re starting to speak up,” he said of Trump voters, “instead of sitting back and taking it. We were feeling like we didn’t have a voice anymore. That’s why we’re behind this guy.” He said he’ll vote for Trump for reelection and “maybe in 2024!” Trump’s critics fear he won’t leave office if he’s defeated next year, or even at the end of a second term, should he win. Trump himself has been nourishing that constitutional nightmare, teasing that he’ll stay president in perpetuity.</p><p dir="ltr">As much as the day belonged to the president, plenty of people on the Mall tuned out the spectacle. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a man stood solemnly before the black granite panels reading the names of service members who died in the war. He’d square up, give a crisp salute, silently scan the names, and then move on to the next panel. I watched for a while and then approached him. He is Tom Scurrah, 69. A Marine Corps veteran who lives outside Boston, Scurrah said he reads 10 names on each panel, says a prayer for the fallen, and tries to imagine what they endured at that point in the war’s history. He’d been at it for a couple of hours. In the distance, I could hear a band playing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: <em>“</em>How does it feel / To be without a home / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown<em>.” </em></p><p dir="ltr">“It’s very emotional,” Scurrah told me. “I see the names and think about how they perished. Veterans at that time were not liked and respected because the war wasn’t liked and respected. Today it’s a different story.” He didn’t plan to stick around for Trump’s speech. When he finished, he said, he’d head out and maybe get a drink.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump didn’t serve in the military or fight in Vietnam. He has given as reasons student deferments and bone spurs in his feet.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trump-reassuring-d-day-message/591196/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump delivered a strong D-Day speech—but it clashed with his personal story</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">But in his presidency, he has sought to yoke himself to military tradition. He has sort of a boyish appreciation for hardware of all sorts. Trump has seldom looked so delighted in office as he did the day in 2017 when he climbed into the driver’s seat of a Mack truck parked at the White House, gripped the steering wheel, and pretended to drive.</p><p dir="ltr">Late last year, he wanted a full-scale military parade. You had the sense he’d be fine with nuclear missiles rolling through the streets of Washington on flatbed trucks, the sort of image we’re used to seeing out of places such as North Korea. But when local and Pentagon officials balked at the cost and logistical difficulties, Trump folded. The more modest display last night amounted to a compromise of sorts.</p><p dir="ltr">In his speech, Trump read off the names of various aircraft, among them B-2 stealth bombers, F-22 Raptors, and F-18 Super Hornets. As an aside, the choreography was flawless. Trump would name the aircraft, and within a minute, the planes would appear, flying low and slow over the Mall before disappearing beyond the Lincoln Memorial. Not so flawless was Trump’s historical timeline. In an odd gaffe, he said that George Washington’s Continental Army “took over the airports” in its fight with the British in the late 18th century. Airplanes were invented in the early 20th century.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump cast the military as a unifying force in American life, a theme of his speech. He opened by saying that on Independence Day, “we come together as one nation.” But as he looked out at the crowd, with the towering Abraham Lincoln statue illuminated behind him, he saw in miniature a nation that is badly divided—ideologically and physically—with the best spots reserved for the well heeled and the well connected. His uplifting tone didn’t last long. Within hours of leaving the stage, the teleprompter gone, Trump was back at it, retweeting messages belittling Democratic presidential candidates and calling protesters who burned a flag near the White House “communists.”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedCarolyn Kaster / APPresident Donald Trump delivered the first July 4 address in more than a half century.Trump Commandeers the Fourth of July2019-07-05T09:34:41-04:002019-07-05T12:18:03-04:00Wandering the National Mall on Independence Day brought you face-to-face with a divided country.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-593254<p dir="ltr">If you fear that President Donald Trump has been underexposed lately—if you missed the back-to-back news conferences he gave in Asia over the weekend, or the 45 tweets he’s sent out since his return, or the footage of him speaking with reporters from the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, or the Fox News interview he gave later that night—know that, on the Fourth of July, he will come out of seclusion.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump is making himself the centerpiece of what traditionally has been a civic celebration on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., delivering an evening address in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He has wrangled the Pentagon into displaying heavy military hardware for the occasion. Invited guests will watch him from a reserved VIP section stretching from the stage toward the Reflecting Pool, with the White House, the Trump reelection campaign, and the Republican National Committee controlling the tickets.</p><p dir="ltr">The event is the latest expression of the 45th president’s creeping ubiquity. A Washington tradition that, for decades, has centered on fireworks and remembrances of the nation’s beginnings is now a camera-ready spectacle that’s decidedly about Trump. Past presidents mostly left the Fourth of July celebration alone. Trump is harnessing it for his own purposes, politicizing patriotic feeling.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump prefers “campaign rallies and parades rather than working through traditional parties and local networks,” Sheri Berman, a political-science professor at Barnard College whose research includes democracy, populism, and fascism, told me. “I think July 4 can be seen as part of the way in which … he mobilizes voters and connects with his base, different from the way a more traditional politician would.” Put another way: “Trump has to colonize everything,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who specializes in authoritarian leaders. “Any holiday, any civic ritual, becomes a Trump ritual.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump has pined for a national military parade since at least July 2017, when he watched French soldiers marching in Paris on Bastille Day. Speaking privately with French President Emmanuel Macron a couple of months later in New York at a United Nations General Assembly meeting, Trump mentioned the display, turned to his delegation, and said “I want horses! I want horses!” a former French official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the conversation. Planning began shortly thereafter for a parade in the fall of 2018, but the administration ultimately <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/17/politics/trump-cancels-military-parade/index.html">scrapped the idea</a>, citing cost estimates for security, traffic control, and other obligations that ran into the tens of millions of dollars.</p><p dir="ltr">The Fourth of July plans seem to resurrect much of what Trump wanted to see. Fighter jets will be streaking overhead. At least two types of tanks, Sherman and Abrams, will be showcased, though they won’t be trundling down Pennsylvania Avenue. (All will be brand-spanking-new, Trump promised. Except … <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/07/02/trump-touts-brand-new-world-war-ii-era-tank-display-at-fourth-of-july-celebration/">it won’t be</a>. The Sherman tank is old; the World War II–era relic hasn’t been in service since the 1950s.) And Trump appears to have gotten his original wish: Horses will be part of an early-afternoon parade along Constitution Avenue.</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/07/02/trump-touts-brand-new-world-war-ii-era-tank-display-at-fourth-of-july-celebration/">Depositing</a> tanks into a crowded city risks some collateral damage. They’re heavy and can crack pavement. An Abrams tank weighs upwards of 60 tons—that’s about 41 Toyota Corollas. Under previous leadership, the Pentagon has been sympathetic to the potential harm. A memo from then–Defense Secretary James Mattis’s office last year cautioned that no tanks should be used for the parade under discussion at that time, and that “consideration must be given to minimize damage to local infrastructure.” Administration officials said the tank displays tomorrow will be “static,” meaning the vehicles won’t be moving.</p><p dir="ltr">Watching plans for the event unfold, the city’s leadership is nervous. They worry the infrastructure won’t be able to accommodate the equipment, and they question whether they’ll be repaid for cleanup and other expenses. That’s not an unrealistic fear. The Trump administration and Congress <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/trump-still-owes-dc-7-million-in-inauguration-costs-as-he-plans-july-fourth-gala/2019/06/13/c55565b6-8df5-11e9-8f69-a2795fca3343_story.html">still owe</a> the District of Columbia more than $7 million from Trump’s 2017 inauguration.</p><p dir="ltr">“We’re obviously concerned about the political nature of the event,” Muriel Bowser, the Democratic mayor of Washington, D.C., told me. Referencing Trump’s VIP section, Bowser noted that “people from all backgrounds and beliefs come down to watch the fireworks with their families and friends. The addition of a seemingly private event could change the tone of that.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump is unmoved. As always, he has the TV audience foremost in his mind, and the show could be eye-popping. The U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels will perform aerial acrobatics. In addition to fighter jets, the helicopters and blue-and-white 747s reserved for the president’s use will take part in flyovers.</p><p dir="ltr">“Our July 4th Salute to America at the Lincoln Memorial is looking to be really big. It will be the show of a lifetime!” Trump tweeted today. The White House has said little about the event. A spokesman referred questions about cost to the National Park Service, which did not respond to a request for comment. In a separate tweet today, Trump said the cost “will be very little compared to what it’s worth.”</p><p dir="ltr">In a period of intense political tribalism, it’s potentially perilous for a president to inject himself into what has typically been a nonpartisan exercise. Former President Barack Obama angered Republicans in 2009 when he delivered something as benign as a back-to-school address at a high school in Northern Virginia. A Florida Republican Party official at the time <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/04/obama.schools/">complained</a> that Obama’s speech was an attempt to “indoctrinate” children and spread “socialist ideology.” (In the end, his remarks were pretty plain vanilla—not one favorable mention of Norman Thomas or other notable socialists. Obama <em>did</em> warn the kids that there was “no excuse for neglecting your homework.” <em>None</em>.)</p><p dir="ltr">But perhaps tribalism is the point. In his remarks, Trump looks poised to wade into more partisan territory. Speaking to reporters yesterday, the presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway said that Trump’s speech will carry a few self-congratulatory notes. He’ll talk about “the success of this administration in opening up so many jobs for individuals, and what we’ve done for veterans,” she said.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump has long sought to fuse his nationalist MAGA brand with patriotic signs and symbols that are supposed to hover above party. He literally hugged the flag at a speech to conservative activists in March. Throughout his term, he’s picked fights with NFL players, especially the former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, for kneeling in protest during the national anthem. In that sense, the Fourth of July was, for Trump, ripe for takeover.</p><p dir="ltr">There’s a practical element, too: He is using the VIP-seating area to reward loyalists and donors, even if the seats may lack the cachet of, say, a White House visit. “It’s not a state-dinner ticket, which I’d really rather get,” a Trump supporter, who was offered a VIP ticket and spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet as much as Trump touts the event as a celebration of the armed forces, some veterans are feeling left out. There are only so many seats in the VIP section, and plenty of campaign supporters who need to be accommodated. One group not getting tickets is the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, according to the organization’s chief executive officer, Jeremy Butler, who has criticized Trump’s Fourth of July plans. “As far as I know, there’s been zero outreach from the administration to our organization,” says Butler, whose group represents more than 171,000 veterans. A White House official said that “various veteran service organizations” were offered tickets.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump’s financial interests stand to benefit from the exhibition he’s created. A <a href="https://www.citizensforethics.org/4th-of-july-trump-hotel-rates-skyrocket/">review</a> by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) last month found that Trump’s hotel in D.C., which sits a few blocks from the Mall, figures to do lucrative business this week. The nightly rate on July 5, topping $1,100, is more than double the sum for a normal Friday, CREW said. Comparable luxury hotels in the area are not seeing the same spike in nightly rates. A spokeswoman for the hotel declined to comment.</p><p dir="ltr">Whatever Trump says in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln (a man to whom he once paid a rare compliment: “very presidential”), he will have succeeded in putting his stamp on Independence Day ceremonies that his predecessors largely avoided. Republican President George W. Bush liked to invite friends and staff up to the White House’s Truman Balcony to watch fireworks “and generally have excellent fried chicken,” the former Bush aide Karl Rove told me. Obama would hold events for military families and administration aides on the White House’s South Lawn and then watch the fireworks from the roof or the Truman Balcony. That’s how Trump celebrated the holiday last year. Pete Souza, a former official White House photographer who chronicled the celebrations in the Obama era, said in an interview that Trump “is politicizing it. He’s making the Fourth of July about him and not us.”</p><p dir="ltr">The last time a president directly took part in the celebration on the Mall was in 1951, when Harry Truman <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/what-did-the-presidents-do-on-july-fourth.htm">delivered a speech</a> at the Washington Monument on the 175th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump’s celebration marks the 243rd anniversary—hardly a nice round number that merits special attention.</p><p dir="ltr">As Trump’s plans for a celebration gelled, a subplot was whether he could persuade the military to go along with them—a running drama in this administration. Trump appears to view the Pentagon, as he does the Justice Department, as a tool for promoting his own interests. In one recent example, before Trump’s trip to Japan in May, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-wanted-uss-john-mccain-out-of-sight-during-trump-japan-visit-11559173470">White House wanted</a> the Navy to move the USS John S. McCain “out of sight” during his visit, lest the boat remind him of the deceased senator he dislikes.</p><p dir="ltr">Patrick Shanahan, the former acting defense secretary, warned afterward that the military must not be “politicized.” But with the current power vacuum at the Pentagon, officials coughed up the tanks Trump wanted. “It’s more evidence of the domestication of the military,” Ben-Ghiat says. “They’ve been subordinated to the personality cult of Trump.” On our 243rd birthday, Trump might not want it any other way.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedAlex Edelman / GettyTrump’s Fourth of July Takeover Was Inevitable2019-07-03T11:37:24-04:002019-07-03T13:37:25-04:00The event is the latest expression of the 45th president’s creeping ubiquity.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-593038<p dir="ltr">For those of you who didn’t get to see President Donald Trump’s news conference early Saturday, let’s recap what he said: Former Secretary of State John Kerry broke the law in talking to Iran about its nuclear program. Jimmy Carter was a terrible president. Russian President Vladimir Putin says he didn’t interfere in the 2016 elections, and, come on, how many times are you going to push the guy on that point? Vast numbers of illegal immigrants may soon be deported from the United States. And, circling back to Putin, the Russian president kind of makes sense when he says that Western-style liberalism is dead, at least when you consider the sorry state of a couple of Democratic-run cities in California.</p><p dir="ltr">That’s by no means a comprehensive list. At one point in the hour-and-15-minute news conference in Japan, Trump squinted at the roomful of reporters with their hands raised and asked whether they’d had enough. Did they want him to stop or keep going? Watching from home at 3 a.m., I didn’t get a vote. But I have to confess: If my colleagues in Japan had opted to pack it in, I wouldn’t have been inconsolable. Speaking in a low monotone at the Imperial Hotel Osaka, Trump seemed to be pushing the outer limits of how much news the bloodstream can safely absorb.</p><p dir="ltr">After the press conference, Trump boarded Air Force One for a trip to Seoul, South Korea. He has dangled the possibility of a meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, at the demilitarized zone between the two countries. He tweeted about the plan Friday night, and noted at the news conference that Kim reads his tweets and that North Korea is open to the idea (CNN chyron: “Trump says Kim Jong Un follows his Twitter feed.”). It is unclear whether Kim has a Twitter account—and if he does, whether it’s under his own name.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr">Read: <i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/will-trump-and-kim-meet-again/592873/?utm_source=feed">Trump invites Kim Jong Un to yet another summit</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program appear stalled. Indeed, North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear-weapons material <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/will-trump-and-kim-meet-again/592873/?utm_source=feed">has likely grown</a> since Trump last year sought to roll back the country’s weapons program through personal diplomacy.</p><p>Trump walked out of a summit meeting with Kim in February as talks broke down. If they do meet this weekend, Trump said, it would be a quick hello and a handshake. He said he’d be willing to cross the demilitarized zone and see Kim in North Korean territory. “I feel very comfortable doing that,” he said, following a blitz of meetings over the past two days with Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and other foreign counterparts.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump said he and Xi made progress in settling a trade dispute that has shaken financial markets. He said he’ll hold off on imposing additional tariffs on Chinese goods, while China has agreed to buy more U.S. farm products. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to be a deal, but they would like to make a deal, and if we could make a deal it would be a very historic event. We’ve never had a deal with China. We’ve had tremendous [trade] deficits.” The president says he believes that large trade deficits are bad for a country’s economy—a view <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/07/why-the-u-s-trade-deficit-can-be-a-sign-of-a-healthy-economy">not shared</a> by many mainstream economists. </p><p dir="ltr">Trump was pressed on whether he raised difficult subjects with a pair of autocratic leaders whose affections he deems important: Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince. Before his meeting with Putin at the G20 conference in Osaka, reporters had asked Trump whether he would tell the Russian leader not to interfere in the 2020 elections, as U.S. intelligence agencies believe happened in 2016 . Trump smiled and wagged his finger at Putin: “Don’t meddle in the election, please,” he said. At the press conference, Trump said that he and Putin “did discuss it a little bit after that.”</p><p dir="ltr">He added, though, “He denies it totally. How many times can you get somebody to deny something? He has in the past denied it. He’s denied it also publicly.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr">Read: <i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/trumps-good-cop-routine-putin/589426/?utm_source=feed">How Trump thinks he can outsmart Putin</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">A reporter asked the president about an<a href="http://www.ft.com/content/670039ec-98f3-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36"> interview </a>Putin gave the <em>Financial Times</em>, in which the Russian leader cast pluralistic, liberal societies as outmoded.</p><p>Trump seemed to misunderstand the question, though, interpreting the word <em>liberal</em> in an American political context. Putin, he said, “sees what’s going on” in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other U.S. cities “run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.” He went on to say that Putin “does see things that are happening in the United States that would probably preclude him from saying how wonderful it is.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump said that he confronted the Saudi prince about the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A United Nations report <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/credible-evidence-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-liable-for-jamal-khashoggi-murder-un-expert/">released earlier this month</a> found evidence that Salman and other senior Saudi officials were liable for the murder.</p><p dir="ltr">“I asked him what was happening,” Trump said of his meeting with Salman. He said that the prince was “very angry about” the murder and updated Trump on efforts to prosecute those responsible. “I did mention it to him very strongly,” he said. But he also stressed the importance of the alliance with the kingdom, saying that Saudi purchases are important to the U.S. economy. Then he parlayed a question about Khashoggi’s death into an attack on his erstwhile opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton. He said he wouldn’t comment on a CIA assessment that Salman ordered the killing because it involves classified intelligence. In a reference to Clinton’s use of a personal email account when she dealt with classified material as secretary of state, Trump said that he’s empowered to declassify information, “unlike Hillary Clinton.”</p><p dir="ltr">“She decided to just give it out,” he said.</p><p dir="ltr">The FBI investigated Clinton’s use of a personal email server in 2016 and concluded that while she’d been “extremely careless” in her practices, her actions did not merit criminal charges.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr">Read: <i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trump-2020-debates/592927/?utm_source=feed">It’s still the Trump show</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">While Trump was away at the G20 Summit, the Democratic presidential candidates held a pair of debates in Miami. Trump said he has been following the kerfuffle involving the Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden. At the debate Thursday night, Senator Kamala Harris of California skewered Biden over his past opposition to busing as a means of integrating public schools. Trump has been harshly critical of Biden, whom campaign aides see as the Democrats’ strongest candidate. Yet in the news conference, Trump talked about Biden with uncharacteristic sympathy. He said that Harris had gotten “too much credit” and that Biden “was hit harder than he should have been hit.”</p><p dir="ltr">Biden’s eloquence is no match for “Winston Churchill,” Trump said, but in fairness to him Harris’s attack seemed precooked.</p><p dir="ltr">As the news conference played out, Trump seemed in no hurry for it to end. His next stop was Seoul, but as he told reporters, Air Force One doesn’t take off without him. He had one concern: that the press might report he held the spotlight too long. “If you want, I’ll go on,” he said.</p><p dir="ltr">On he went.</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedKevin Lamarque / Reuters‘If You Want, I’ll Go On’: Trump’s Rambling News Conference2019-06-29T09:10:50-04:002019-06-30T20:29:15-04:00The president defended Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman while airing his grievances against Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and the Democratic Party.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-592927<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Former Vice President Joe Biden called President Donald Trump a tool of Wall Street who has “ripped” out the nation’s soul. The author Marianne Williamson accused Trump of exploiting people’s fears. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont cast Trump as a “pathological liar” and a “racist.”</p><p dir="ltr">Trump might as well have been gripping a podium of his own last night, so prominently did he figure into the two-hour Democratic debate in Miami. And if a spot onstage had been offered to him, you had a sense he might have grabbed it. Trump was nearly 8,000 miles away from the 2020 Democrats invoking his name, starting a whirlwind day of meetings with foreign leaders in Osaka, Japan. But the scene in Miami was much on his mind. Between meetings with German and Indian leaders, the president made time to tweet about the 10-person debate and later told reporters he had caught a snippet of it on television. Standing beside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump mentioned the previous night’s debate with 10 candidates, saying, “It wasn’t very exciting.” Merkel didn’t play along. Listening to Trump’s foray into partisan domestic politics, the German leader stood “stoned-faced,” a pool reporter wrote.</p><p dir="ltr">If these first two debates showed anything, though, it’s how tough it will be for Democratic candidates to compete with Trump for attention. Incumbency gives any president an advantage—even more so in Trump’s case. He’s shown he can commandeer news cycles through unexpected policy pronouncements that move markets and rattle nations. Democratic candidates who stay focused on the finer points of U.S. industrial policy risk getting drowned out by the insults and outrages Trump dispenses around the clock. “BORING!” Trump tweeted from Air Force One while watching Wednesday night’s debate.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trump-2020-campaign-kickoff-orlando/592018/?utm_source=feed">Read: For true Trump believers, the magic isn’t lost</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">With his megaphone, Trump can upstage Democrats at every turn, for better or worse. As the first 10 Democrats readied themselves for the debate Wednesday, Trump gave an interview to the Fox Business Network in which he demeaned his handpicked Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, and accused Special Counsel Robert Mueller of having committed a “crime” in his handling of the Russia investigation. He wasn’t done. Trump went on to insult an ally he was on his way to visit. If the United States were attacked, he complained, Japan wouldn’t help. Instead, “they can watch it on a Sony television, the attack,” he said.</p><p dir="ltr">Even Trump’s trip to Japan has turned out to be a bit of 2020 counterprogramming. Hours after the Democrats left the stage last night, Trump went into a high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. A lingering point of contention is Russian interference in U.S. elections. U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections to help defeat Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton—a conclusion the president has resisted. At a summit in Helsinki last year, Trump appeared to accept Putin’s word that Russia didn’t interfere in 2016. Would Trump warn Putin not to disrupt American elections in 2020? “Yes, of course I will,” Trump told reporters. Turning to Putin, he said: “Don’t meddle in the election, President. Don’t meddle in the election.” A readout of the meeting later provided by the White House didn’t mention election interference as an issue that was broached. On Wednesday night, the candidates were asked to identify what they see as the biggest threat to the U.S., and only one—New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—said Russia.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/trump-2020-second-term/585994/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump’s second term</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">With the first round of debates complete, it’s clear that the candidates are split on how to confront Trump going forward. Certainly the party’s rank-and-file wants them to take a combative approach. <a href="https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/444295-poll-democratic-voters-prioritize-defeating-trump-over-their">A poll last month</a> showed that 65 percent of Democrats or those who lean Democratic said it’s more important to nominate a candidate who stands the best chance of ousting Trump than one who agrees with them on the issues.</p><p dir="ltr">One of the biggest applause lines at Wednesday’s debate came when Washington Governor Jay Inslee, asked to name the country’s biggest security threat, gave a clear-cut answer: “The biggest threat to the security of the United States is Donald Trump. No question about it.” The first words out of Biden’s mouth on Thursday were an attack on Trump, as were the last words he spoke.</p><p dir="ltr">Other candidates were more tepid, targeting the president largely on policy grounds. At Wednesday’s debate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota faulted Trump for not reducing prescription-drug prices. Julián Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development, promised to overhaul Trump’s immigration policies. These sorts of policy-based critiques of a norm-shattering president whom many Democrats want impeached were likely to fall flat, Williamson warned last night. “It’s nice if we have all these plans,” she said, “but if you think we beat Donald Trump by having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming, because he didn’t win by saying he had a plan. He won by simply saying ‘Make America Great Again.’”</p><p dir="ltr">This time around, Trump’s advisers haven’t settled on the sort of campaign they’d like him to run. One faction wants to try a “Rose Garden” strategy that maximizes his stature as a sitting president. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trumps-white-house-isnt-ready-impeachment/592189/?utm_source=feed">Another recognizes it’s fruitless to expect that sort of discipline from him</a>.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/trump-may-need-talk-economy-win-2020/592153/?utm_source=feed">Read: The biggest obstacle to Trump’s victory in 2020</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Whatever the plan, these advisers acknowledge, Trump will do what he wants, relying on the same instincts that got him elected in 2016. Before the debate began last night, I asked one of Trump’s political advisers, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely, whether they expected the president to tweet about the proceedings. It was evident the campaign had no clue. “We’ll see what he decides,” the adviser told me. “He’s the boss.”</p><p dir="ltr">From the looks of things, the “Rose Garden” proponents are losing the argument. Shuttling between meetings in Osaka, ostensibly focused on the growing conflict with Iran, the unrest in Venezuela, and the world economy, Trump sounded wistful for the televised skirmish in Miami. In a tweet that came in the early evening Friday from Japan, Trump wrote that he was “representing our Country well, but I heard it was not a good day for Sleepy Joe [Biden] or Crazy Bernie [Sanders]. One is exhausted, the other is nuts—so what’s the big deal?”</p>Peter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedPaul Spella / The AtlanticIt’s Still the Trump Show2019-06-28T09:40:06-04:002019-06-28T12:24:46-04:00Donald Trump wasn’t onstage during the first Democratic debates, but he might as well have been.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-592516<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">That Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, was generally opposed to major new restrictions on fetal-tissue research wasn’t necessarily relevant. What mattered was that Joe Grogan—the faceless director of a little-known White House office called the Domestic Policy Council (DPC)—felt differently.</p><p dir="ltr">It was the end of May, and the two camps had been sparring for several weeks over the policy. Azar, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/trump-administration-imposes-new-restrictions-on-fetal-tissue-research-1354165">according to <em>Politico</em></a>, sought a less restrictive measure, echoing scientists’ concerns about how a total ban on federally funded fetal-tissue research could inhibit the potential for medical breakthroughs. (The tissue, which is obtained mainly from abortions, has been used to help develop vaccines for diseases such as polio, chicken pox, and hepatitis A.)</p><p dir="ltr">But Grogan argued for ending such research at the National Institutes of Health entirely. Nevermind that Grogan was someone, one White House official joked to us in a recent interview, whom President Donald Trump likely couldn’t pick out of a lineup, or that the DPC had been largely irrelevant for the past two-plus years. Grogan was Mick Mulvaney’s guy, a loyalist who followed him from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to the White House, and he’s part of a cadre of conservative, like-minded advisers Mulvaney has sprinkled throughout the West Wing since becoming acting chief of staff in January. Besides that, Mulvaney agreed with his appointee: He believed that government scientists should be barred from doing fetal-tissue research. With the help of anti-abortion activists, the duo made their case to the president.</p><p dir="ltr">On the morning of June 5, Trump announced that not only would his administration end such research at the NIH, but it would also cancel an HIV research contract with the University of California at San Francisco, which required fetal tissue for its work on new HIV therapies. “Promoting the dignity of human life from conception to natural death is one of the very top priorities of President Trump’s administration,” HHS said in a statement that day.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/hhs-trump-religious-freedom/588697/?utm_source=feed">Read: Health and Human Services and the Religious Liberty War</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">In nearly any other administration, a DPC aide less than six months into his or her job would, to a Cabinet secretary, be the equivalent of a sand flea. To be sure, this used to be the dynamic in the Trump administration as well, with policy staffers running up against not just the Cabinet but also the president’s children and others who had early on claimed key issues as their own, as Jared Kushner did with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p><p dir="ltr">But unlike his predecessor, Grogan has apparently found a way to use that dynamic to his advantage. White House officials often refer to the “shiny-object phenomenon” when discussing the president or those closest to him—the tendency for Trump and Kushner, mainly, to find themselves consumed by whatever the hot topic of the day is, and not much else. There are downsides to this, officials say, in that attempts at well-laid plans are often railroaded on a whim, and that what should be good news has an uncanny tendency to devolve into bad news. But there are upsides, too: Working as a policy staffer on an issue that Trump and Kushner do not fancy at the moment allows one to make plans with less fear that they might spontaneously combust. And in some cases, it allows one to shuttle through controversial policies without many people noticing.</p><p dir="ltr">At least, that’s how Grogan sees it. And according to a dozen current and former White House and administration officials who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to divulge private conversations, that “aggressive” posture, as one official put it, has made for a noteworthy shift in the Domestic Policy Council’s clout. As Mulvaney’s functional deputy, these sources say, Grogan is deeply invested in bringing the acting chief of staff’s health-care and deregulatory vision to life. At times, that vision has notably clashed with both Azar and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta on issues such as drug pricing or deregulation. But Grogan’s ideological kinship with Mulvaney has helped render the Cabinet less and less an obstacle. Grogan’s approach, he told us in a phone interview, is “to be on permanent offense around here, constantly driving policy forward … and not wasting time.”</p><p dir="ltr">The ceaseless churn of news in the Trump era means White House decisions that at one time would’ve dominated headlines for weeks barely register. In no episode was that more apparent than the fetal-tissue research ban: Whereas the George W. Bush administration’s decision to ban federal funding for stem-cell research in 2001 made for a defining cultural flash point, hardly anyone seemed to notice the White House’s announcement on fetal tissue, even in a moment when the abortion debate is more fraught than ever, with nine states, including Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio, signing early or near-total abortion bans into law. As Grogan sees it, though, with such dissonance comes power—the ability to realize conservative policy goals, expand Mulvaney’s reach across government, and evade any of the backlash that those actions, in another time, would surely spark. The result is a dynamic that, for better or worse, could make the next two years the most quietly impactful period of Trump’s presidency.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Historically, the DPC has not been notably powerful. It was founded in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan more as a way to streamline White House policy processes than infuse its members with new power over them. And it was altered eight years later by President Bill Clinton, who split the office to form the National Economic Council, which to this day is largely seen as the more influential and high-profile policy body in the West Wing. Under Trump, for example, the NEC took the lead on tax reform, one of this administration’s more substantial achievements.</p><p dir="ltr">Still, some sources argued to us that a relatively low-profile position comes with valuable maneuvering room, especially in a time when Trump’s tweets command far more attention than the minutiae of his policies. But they said that Andrew Bremberg—a former George W. Bush HHS official who was Trump’s first pick to lead the DPC—failed to capitalize on that dynamic. That’s not to say he didn’t accomplish anything. But overall, the current and former officials say, Bremberg preferred to involve himself in big-ticket items on which he’d have little to no sway—dominated as they were by, say, Kushner or Stephen Miller—rather than focus more on pushing traditionally conservative policies in areas that the Kushners and Millers of the White House didn’t care about. And it didn’t help that the first major issue that Bremberg took ownership of—repealing and replacing Obamacare—was a colossal failure. (Bremberg declined to comment for this story.)</p><p dir="ltr">As Bremberg’s influence was dwindling, Grogan was testing the limits of his own. In March 2017, Grogan joined the OMB under Mulvaney as the associate director of health programs. He came to the office from the drug company Gilead Sciences, where he worked as a lobbyist. In financial-disclosure records, he listed his income at the company as $823,000. He had also served as an adviser in the Food and Drug Administration during George W. Bush’s presidency.</p><p dir="ltr">In July 2018, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings <a href="https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/documents/2018-07-11.EEC%20to%20Mulvaney-OMB%20re.Joseph%20Grogan.pdf">raised concerns with Mulvaney</a> that Grogan was in violation of the Trump administration’s ethics rules, given that he was working on a payment model for a specific method of cancer treatment just as his former employer was looking to acquire a company developing the same method of treatment. “Mr. Grogan’s actions … raise serious concerns about whether President Trump’s drug pricing policies are intended to benefit drug companies rather than American consumers,” Cummings wrote. (When asked about Cummings’s concerns, Grogan told us that he had “divested of all private interests, at considerable cost” and that he had “sold all my stock in my previous employer. There are no conflicts with my previous employer or industry.” He added that he’d still like to work with Cummings to bring down drug prices.)</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/kellyanne-conway-repeatedly-broke-law/591628/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: Kellyanne Conway broke the law—and is going to get away with it </a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Ethics questions aside, Grogan intended to make the most of his new role. It wasn’t long after Azar succeeded Tom Price as HHS secretary that tensions began to simmer between his department and OMB. Grogan and Azar found themselves at odds in particular on drug pricing, with Grogan frequently opposed to Azar’s proposals to fulfill Trump’s campaign pledge to lower costs.</p><p dir="ltr">“Grogan would slow things down as a process matter” to try and make his own “comments and issues” known “even though the fundamental policy thing had been decided,” a source familiar with the matter told us. “And Mulvaney wasn’t going to police that properly. It was like, um, the secretary and the president decided we’re doing this; you can’t try to stop it by nonconcurring as a desk officer at OMB.”</p><p dir="ltr">On January 22, 2019, when the new Mulvaney-led White House announced that Grogan would officially be taking over the Domestic Policy Council, Azar and his allies, the source said, “were very concerned.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p dir="ltr">After two years, Bremberg exited the White House to try and become ambassador to the U.S. mission in Geneva, a position for which he’s still awaiting confirmation. He left for Grogan a hollowed-out council within a hollowed-out White House whose chances of any meaningful policy victory ahead of 2020 seemed to get slimmer by the day.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet Grogan wasn’t looking for meaningful policy victories, necessarily—or at least not the kind flashy enough to play out on the House and Senate floors and be debated ad nauseam on cable-news panels. And he wasn’t looking to make headway on an infrastructure plan or work with Kushner on immigration reform or argue with Miller over tariffs. He had his own goals in mind, chiefly to do with health-care and undoing the Obama regulatory agenda, which made him an ideal ally for Mulvaney. "Mick and I see the world the same way, largely,” Grogan told us. “And the number one thing we're seeing is the fact we only have so much time in the first term."</p><p dir="ltr">“The Trump shiny-object phenomenon has made the regulatory process far easier than it should be,” Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told us. “Normally you’d expect people to be reacting very publicly and very negatively … but they’re completely preoccupied with whatever <em>Trump</em> is doing.”</p><p dir="ltr">Grogan has been keen to embrace the shiny-object phenomenon. He made several hires as he tried to ramp up the 15-member council’s metabolism. Grogan told us that he feels obligated to execute “much-needed regulatory reforms” that the president has demanded. It’s not such a surprise, then, that HHS officials bristled at Grogan’s appointment—not only was he ideologically opposed in many ways to Azar, but he was also quick to show that in his new role, he had no interest in being a wallflower. (Grogan said that he meets with Trump “regularly.”)</p><p dir="ltr">But there were other things, too, that foretold a chipping away of Azar’s power at HHS. The White House official said that the health secretary has been “coming unraveled a bit” ever since the administration instituted its “zero tolerance” policy, in which migrant families were separated upon crossing the southern border beginning last spring. “He was really rattled by it, and HHS is still dealing with the fallout,” the official said, referring to the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which today is overseeing tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors. Lawyers who visited a Border Patrol station in Texas last week found 300 children living in squalid conditions without adequate food or water and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/06/immigrant-children-border-parentification/592393/?utm_source=feed">in some cases caring for one another</a>. Most of the children were transferred to different facilities in recent days, amid outrage from a bipartisan group of lawmakers, but then 100 were returned to the same station.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/06/child-detention-centers-immigration-attorney-interview/592540/?utm_source=feed">Read: ‘Children were dirty, they were scared, and they were hungry’</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Azar has accordingly taken a slightly more timid stance in dealings with the White House. That was less problematic for the success of his initiatives in the past, given that he and Bremberg were largely aligned ideologically. But policy disagreements with Grogan, combined with Grogan’s more assertive posture, have left Azar on shakier footing. “It shouldn’t be a situation where DPC is telling HHS what to do,” the White House official said, “but that’s what Joe is trying to do.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">The extent to which the executive branch has overpowered the legislative branch over the past two-plus years has been well documented. But Grogan’s newfound influence—made possible by his eagerness to go head-to-head with Azar—highlights how the White House is consolidating more and more power within the executive branch itself. The result is an administration in which the West Wing—far above the Cabinet and both chambers of Congress—represents the origin of an increasing number of meaningful decisions about the future of this country.</p><p dir="ltr">Asked about friction between his agency and the White House, Azar told us that their goals are identical, even if they’ve differed over tactics. “We are one administration, one team, with the president on drug pricing,” Azar said, while heading into the White House for a meeting with Trump on Monday. “My boss is so firmly committed to get drug prices down and his team is completely committed. We may have debates about the best approaches—this, that, or the other. But as the president said on Friday, he makes the decisions on everything and we’re all aligned.”</p><p dir="ltr">For Grogan, the fetal-tissue announcement on June 5 underscored the savviness of the calculation that ceding turf on the issues of the day to Kushner and the like, in order to more narrowly focus on one’s own priorities, would make for a more effective DPC. That also seemed clear on June 14, when Trump announced in the Rose Garden that the White House had issued a new rule meant to expand health-care options for small businesses. The rule allows employers to offer tax-exempted funds, known as health-reimbursement arrangements, to help workers buy insurance plans on the individual markets in place of offering a company plan. Grogan, who alongside Brian Blase at the National Economic Council finalized the measure, told reporters ahead of the announcement that it would “provide hundreds of thousands of businesses a better way to offer health-insurance coverage, and millions of workers and their families a better way to obtain coverage.” John Tozzi <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-14/a-trio-of-trump-rules-will-remake-u-s-health-insurance-markets">summed up the significance of the rule</a> for <em>Bloomberg</em>: “The cumulative effect could erode a core principle of the ACA: ensuring that people can rely on their health insurance if they get sick, and to spread the costs of illness widely.”</p><p dir="ltr">Another sign of Grogan’s influence is the extent to which he and Mulvaney appear to be reshaping agencies with which they’ve previously been at odds. An example is the Labor Department, headed by Acosta. White House officials have been upset with Acosta for slow-walking deregulation efforts, prompting suspicions inside the administration that he was doing so because he wanted a judgeship some day and doesn’t want to alienate Democratic lawmakers, one person familiar with the matter said. One of Acosta’s former deputies, Nick Geale, had clashed with the DPC, making critical remarks about the council in private meetings, according to people familiar with the matter.</p><p dir="ltr">Grogan declined to comment when asked if he and Mulvaney helped orchestrate Geale’s departure. He did say, though, that he had little patience for agencies that fail to follow through on Trump’s deregulatory measures. “I don’t want to say I’m putting pressure on them—I just don’t want the White House to be an excuse,” Grogan said. “I don’t want someone to say, ‘Oh, great. We sent it to DPC and now … we don’t have to worry about it.’”</p><p dir="ltr">Last month <a href="https://www.axios.com/labor-secretary-alex-acosta-top-aide-clash-6f17fe53-a68c-4ba7-91f0-79b22c32c6ff.html">in <em>Axios</em></a>, Geale said that “there are lots of passionate people in the administration, and I certainly am one of them. I believe I’ve done a great job in implementing the president’s vision.” (Geale declined to comment for this story.)</p><p dir="ltr">A spokesperson for Acosta said the Labor Department has already locked in more than $3 billion in “deregulatory savings” and has more measures in the works. The department “continues to work aligned with presidential priorities. Any suggestions made otherwise is contrary to these facts,” the spokesperson said.</p><p dir="ltr">Grogan seems poised to take his momentum into drug pricing, pushing largely to maintain the “status quo” while Azar attempts to lower costs, according to the source familiar with the matter. The two officials <em>have</em> managed to reach a middle ground on increasing cost transparency: On Monday, Trump issued an executive order that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/24/politics/trump-executive-order-health-care/index.html">requires hospitals to disclose list prices for common items and services.</a> But Grogan and Azar’s disagreements on how to address the prices themselves, the source added, have made for the “defining dynamic” between the White House and HHS.</p><p dir="ltr">“Grogan has been much more stubborn about sticking to how Republicans have traditionally thought about drug pricing, i.e., generally defending pharma,” the source told us. The White House official said that internally, Grogan says his opposition to Azar’s efforts—such as rolling back rebates paid by drug manufacturers to pharmacy middlemen and instituting changes to Medicare premiums—are rooted in concern about adding to the already steep federal deficit. “But staff [are] always wondering if it’s actually for more personal reasons,” the official added, referring to Grogan’s lobbying background.</p><p dir="ltr">It would seem a losing battle for Grogan, given President Trump’s campaign promise and recent speeches in which he has affirmed his desire to lower drug costs. The reality, though, is that Trump does not have as visceral an attachment to the issue as he does to, say, tariffs and immigration, meaning he is far more likely to entrust his aides to the fine print. Added to that is the fact that Mulvaney doesn’t care much for debating the policy himself, according to the White House official, who said that following a recent staff meeting on the issue, Mulvaney joked that he “fell asleep” while aides were discussing it. In other words, Grogan has potentially ample room to choreograph the administration’s efforts on drug pricing, which could help ensure that current costs, contrary to Trump’s desire, stay steady.</p><p dir="ltr">Grogan’s latitude in this respect could very well increase in the months to come, as Trump’s reelection campaign kicks into high gear and even fewer people—the president included—are paying attention to policy. As for the future, Grogan demurred when asked what regulations, whether in the health-care space or otherwise, he’s looking to unravel next. “They’re people who are living their lives in the real world who’ve been regulated to death by Washington, D.C. And we trust them more than other administrations have,” Grogan told us. But, he added, “I don’t want to telegraph too much of anything that’s market-moving.”</p>Elaina Plotthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedPeter Nicholashttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-nicholas/?utm_source=feedChip Somodevilla / Getty / The AtlanticJoe Grogan, seated to President Donald Trump's right, has quietly become an influential administration figure.How a Forgotten White House Team Gained Power in the Trump Era2019-06-27T05:00:00-04:002019-06-27T17:14:18-04:00Changes in the makeup of the Domestic Policy Council have already had broad national effects.